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History of the Maldives: the islands and their sultanate in the accounts of early travellers

The Maldives are a string of some 1,200 low islands, grouped in atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean, on the sea route linking Arabia, India and Southeast Asia. Arab geographers of the ninth and tenth centuries, such as al-Masudi, wrote of countless islands ruled by a queen, and above all of the source of cowries, the small shells used as money as far away as Bengal and West Africa.

The islanders, who came from India and Ceylon, were first Buddhists; tradition dates their conversion to Islam to 1153. The first great witness was Ibn Battuta, who landed in 1343, became a judge, married several local women and left the following year: he described Queen Khadija, the coconut palm that supplied everything from rope to ships, and the freedom of the women, which shocked him. Admiral Zheng He's Chinese fleets called there in the early fifteenth century, and the interpreter Ma Huan noted the ambergris and the cowries.

The Portuguese, who reached India in 1498, wanted to control coir, the coconut fibre rope essential to Indian Ocean shipping. They occupied Malé from 1558 to 1573 before being driven out by Muhammad Thakurufaanu, a national hero whose victory is still celebrated. In 1602 a French ship broke up on a reef in the atolls: its survivors spent five years as captives of the sultan, and it was through them that Europe learned of the islanders' language, court, fisheries and beliefs.

The sultanate later paid tribute to the Dutch in Ceylon, then to the British, who made it a protectorate in 1887 while leaving the sultan to govern. Officers of the East India Company's navy, led by Robert Moresby, drew the first accurate chart of the atolls between 1834 and 1836. In 1879 Harry Charles Purvis Bell, a Ceylon civil servant, was shipwrecked there in turn; he returned in 1920 and 1922 to study the Buddhist ruins, inscriptions and chronicles, and became the first modern historian of the islands. The Maldivians also kept their own annals, written in Arabic at the court of Malé. The country became independent in 1965.

This collection brings together our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early writings on the Maldives.

Our titles on this subject

Cover of The Star Raft by Fei Xin

The Star Raft

Fei Xin, 1409-1433

Half a century before Vasco da Gama, a soldier of Zheng He's fleet describes forty-four countries across Asia, the Indian Ocean, Arabia, and East Africa. A Chinese view of the fifteenth-century world.

In the early fifteenth century, Ming China sent the largest fleets of the age into the Indian Ocean. Fei Xin sailed with them as an ordinary soldier, neither envoy nor admiral, and he writes as a literate member of the crew. His forty-four entries, each closed by a poem, describe Malacca, Calicut and Hormuz as the Chinese empire saw them, before the Portuguese arrived to redraw the trade routes of the whole region.
Cover of The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval by François Pyrard de Laval

The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval

François Pyrard de Laval, 1601-1611

Shipwrecked in the Maldives, captive five years: the first Frenchman to tell of the Indian Ocean.

At the turn of the seventeenth century the French were only beginning to try the route to the Indies, already disputed between the Portuguese and the Dutch. Pyrard de Laval, a mere hand aboard, lost his ship there and spent five years in the Maldives, whose language and customs he learned. He saw Asia not from a trading post but from inside island societies, then from the prisons and hospitals of Portuguese India, and his testimony remains a major source for the early history of the Maldives.
Cover of Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies by Alexander Hamilton

Thirty Years on the Seas of the Indies

Alexander Hamilton, 1688-1723

A Scottish merchant spends thirty-five years crossing the Indian Ocean, from the Cape to Basra and Bombay. Shipwrecks, trading posts, the court of the Great Mughal: up to the reckless war Aurangzeb wages against the English Com...

Around 1700 the western Indian Ocean was changing masters: the Omanis of Muscat drove the Portuguese from the Swahili coast, Safavid Persia collapsed before the Afghans, and the English Company risked its first war against Aurangzeb. Hamilton, an independent trader whom the companies regarded as an interloper, watched these upheavals from the coffee ports, the Persian Gulf and Gujarat. Free of any official tie, his testimony lights up the merchant side of a world being reshaped.

Volumes I II III

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

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