With the commission and will of the blessed Emperor Dizong, we, Nara Tailan and his companions, are tasked with charting the unknown parts of the world said to be known to the barbarians of Xihai,[1] from whence strange goods are brought. Until this day three voyages have taken place in the name of the great Emperor, which we have brought to the barbarians of the northeast, that they should pursue their course while in submission to the proper station of authority. With the great aid of heaven, it is our intention to seek out the barbarians of the uncharted regions of the world, that they may know the Imperial envoy and present tribute.
~
1542 AD
After all these years, you would think they would have bothered to know this part of the world better, Nara Tailan reflected bitterly as he hopped down out of the landing boat and onto the shore.
The bay had been hard to miss - long and shaped like a big horn, it was long known as one of the more sheltered spots along this part of the coast. Known, at least, to the Jurchens - those like him,[2] who had experience living in this part of the world. Perhaps such places as this one, the bay marked on the Emperor's maps simply as "Wanjiao,"[3] were simply beneath Suzhou's notice.
Not that it surprised Tailan all that much. Sometimes the court's thoughts seemed lost in the fluffy clouds of steam that too often billowed in Suzhou's skies on days when the weaponsmiths were hard at work.
"First order of business," the veteran sailor clipped, bringing his hands together with a sharp smack as he looked back towards the fresh-faced Chinese sailors behind him. "Let's find the stele." That should be easy enough. When the Great Wu had rolled back the Hei a century prior, they'd showed marginal interest in at least marking some spots on their maps. For all that areas like this had been neglected as mere tributaries, forgotten so long as the local clans of the
Yupi Dazi[4] paid their tribute through the imperial station up north near the mouth of the Heishui,[5] they'd at least scouted them out enough that a eunuch had come through here and put up a stele more than a century and a half prior, bearing the name of the Emperor Qingzu.
That, at least, wasn't hard to find. A little shuffling around the lands adjacent to the bay turned up discoveries, first and most noticeably a small group of fishermen huddling along the shoreline. With a little bit of prodding from the crew, the fishermen were coaxed relatively easily into offering up what they could, mainly a halfway decent meal and a paltry bounty of furs and crude jewelry.
Nara Tailan accepted it with another bitter reflection.
They give us their treasure when the Emperor wouldn't give this stuff to his least favourite dog. What a cynical empire I live in. Ah well.
Tribute aside, the stele itself was eventually dug out, half-buried in mounds of bushes and clubmoss. Weather hadn't been kind to the tall standing stone, discolouring and staining it in places and wearing at the edges of the carvings, but after the crew had attacked it with brushes and chisels, the inscription was clear enough.
THIS WAS PLACED HERE FOR THE GREAT EMPEROR QINGZU BY HIS HUMBLE SERVANT, AHACU
Nara Tailan closed his eyes for a moment and resisted the urge to sigh.
So once again, they sent one of us to do their dirty work. Nice to know the old tradition persists.
~
1546 AD
"Remind me again what's supposed to be out here," Nara Tailan asked.
"You're asking me?" 'Amr ibn Sa'id al-Dani held his hands out at shoulder height in a broad shrug. "Who's come this way? Not anyone I know."
"Right, I suppose that's the issue." Tailan pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as he moved to the bow of the big junk, one of a dozen fanned out in the frigid seas and sailing off to fuck only knew where.
"Of course it is," huffed the Moorish sailor, stuffing his hands into his sleeves and hunkering into his fur cloak to try and stave off the worst of the chill. "I told you before - nobody
I've ever heard of has been stupid enough to sail into nothing but open water. Maybe Ibn Maymun, but half of his people died, and that was more than a century ago and way off south."
"More than half, wasn't it?"
"Right! The stories say he had six ships and came back with two. Barely!"
Tailan scowled and looked out over the bow, staring into the grey skies ahead. Churning seas rolled against the formidable hull of the junk. "Well, we know the world is wider at the waist than at the top - and this Ibn Maymun of yours went by the waist. And you said that there are lands closer to the top. If that's true, then it would make sense that crossing the sea would be easier where it's cold."
"So long as you don't rip the bottom of the ship out on an iceberg," grumbled ibn Sa'id. "Or freeze to death to begin with."
Scowl giving way to a cynically amused smile, Tailan glanced back at the foreigner. "You really don't like winter very much, do you?"
"I have no idea how you do." Ibn Sa'id shivered heavily. "I traveled to Barshil once. It was literal hell. What your Emperor wants in places like this when your lands are the most glorious in the world, I have no idea."
"More glorious even than Xihai, eh?" Tailan's smile grew mildly curious. "I would have thought you would be homesick."
"Oh, I am. But it's a different sort of place. The scale is smaller. Besides," and here he grimaced, "for all that we're sailing into God knows where for God only knows why your Emperor thinks it's wise, it's better than dealing with idiot scribes trying to tell me how to live my life."
"Xihai seems to have a curious culture," Tailan mused, even as a whistle rang out from high atop the mast.
Both Tailan and ibn Sa'id looked up at once, to where one of the crewmen was gesticulating wildly. "Land!" he screamed down, waving an arm frantically off to the northeast. "Land, land!!"
The pair of mariners looked at each other. Ibn Sa'id was the first to grimace. "What frozen hellhole is it this time?"
"We'll see, won't we?" With a shrug, Tailan swept an arm upwards and raised his voice. "Change course! We're heading for land!"
They did just that. The dozen junks sailed on into the chilly seas of the far north, off towards the rugged jut of land rising out of the bleak waters.
One of a few such juts - rocky, cold, and surprisingly, inhabited by people Tailan vaguely recognized - people not too unlike the Ainu people living north of Riben,[6] albeit with weird accents it took their resident interpreters some time to figure out. By the time they reached the northeastern end of the chain of islets, the ships found themselves at a frigid and mountainous tip of land, home to yet another village of weirdly-dialectic Ainu with little to offer but a baffled tribute of the usual furs and small jewels. One of them offered up the black and white feathers of one of the huge sea eagles they'd been seeing off the coasts.[7]
They put up a stele anyway.
THIS WAS PLACED HERE BY NARA TAILAN AND HIS COMPANIONS, AT THE LAND OF YINGDIAN,[8] IN THE NAME OF THE GREAT EMPEROR DIZONG OF WU
Tailan insisted on carving it two more times. Writing it in his own tongue was easy enough. Writing it out in Ainu was harder and required a lot of sounding out and guesswork as to what symbol would represent what. For all he knew, the thing said it was placed there by a giant sea snail at the Land of Unicorns in the name of two cups of tea and a hill of beans.[9]
~
1550 AD
"I swear that this is the last time I let you talk me into one of these trips," groused an incredibly miserable Ibn Sa'id as he buried himself as deep in his bundle of furs as he possibly could.
"Oh, blow it out your nose," muttered Tailan between bites of
hainiu meat. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend it was cow, albeit with a bizarre cured taste.[10]
They'd been stuck on the island of Little Tayan for nearly a month now. They'd reached Yingdian without much issue - beyond one ship turning back after losing one sail in a storm - but the exploration of the Tayan Islands[11] had taken a turn for the worse when two ships had been wrecked in a storm and two more, including Tailan's, had torn their bottoms out on rocks while trying to shelter from the weather. Another ship had simply gotten lost, leaving just two more vessels - one of which Tailan had sent back for help.
The other stayed - but it wasn't nearly big enough to bring everyone along. That left beaching the damaged ships and trying to patch one up with the remnants of the other, without certain key helpful amenities.
Amenities like a seaport. Or a city. Or adequate shelter. Or much by way of hammers and nails.
Or anyone around but the
hainiu and enough sea lions and otters to populate a small kingdom, really. If nothing else, catching the former was easy enough - they tended to be fat and docile, and once caught, the oil was both potable and burnable. Even now, the candles in their tents burned the stuff, and the skin itself could be worked with.
Not that it did much to appease Ibn Sa'id. "This is the third time now," he muttered, scratching irritably at his beard. "We never run into anything more than villages and winter. I'm starting to think there isn't any way to get to the Gharb al-Aqsa this way, even if we ever get those ships back into the water."
Tailan closed his eyes, slumping forward with growing exhaustion. "If you spent half as much time trying to get us out of this mess as you do whining, we would be halfway back to Suzhou by now."
"Sure, blame me." Ibn Sa'id rolled his eyes. "Mister Servant of the Emperor."
Silence fell over the tent for several moments. Only the rush of the wind against the heavy canvas, rippling it persistently, mingled with the quiet clack of Tailan's utensils against the plate of
hainiu meat in front of him.
It was Ibn Sa'id who finally broke the silence. "...I've been thinking."
"Congratulations," Tailan sassed past a mouthful of sea cow meat.
Ibn Sa'id shot him a sour look before breaking off into a sniffle and wiping his nose with the back of his hand. "Ghh. I'm being serious. I've been thinking about the currents we've run into. How we came back from Yingdian the last time on a current."
"Yes, and we had to sail into it on the way up. What's your point?"
"Have you ever heard of a
qus al-bahr?"
"Translate it to not-barbarian," Tailan huffed.
With a scowl, Ibn Sa'id picked up a well-boiled
hainiu rib and etched out a circle in the sand. "A sea-arc. All sailors on the Atlas know how to do it. The ocean currents there move in gyres. You can sail out of a place like Isbili and turn your ship in such a way that you can sail with the current all the way to Marayu. Then to go home, you turn with the current and it loops you back around. You end up back off the coast of the Andalus." He drew out another circle. "Like I said. Gyres, Tailan,
gyres. Qus al-bahr is fundamental."
Sass or no, Tailan turned away from his plate and leaned forward to eye the circles. He scratched at his cheek with two fingers before nodding. "Right, gyres exist, obviously. So what you're saying is..."
"...that the current was pushing us west when we sailed out here, too. That's why we had so much trouble. What if we're trying to sail a
qus al-bahr backwards?" The Moor's eyes flickered with intent.
Tailan opened his mouth slightly, but closed it as realization hit him. Frowning, he took the rib from Ibn Sa'id and marked out spots along the circumference of the circle. "Well, Yingdian is here. And these islands are here. Which means we've been sailing
entirely into the return part of the current."
"Yes,
exactly." Sniffling again, Ibn Sa'id jabbed a spot in the sand below one of the marks Tailan had made. "So what if we went down
here? Instead of going due northeast from Wanjiao Bay, we should try to go east around Riben. If we can find the part of the current that goes east, we can probably make a
qus al-bahr and it'd bring us right back around this way on the way home."
"I can see one problem with it. We don't know how far we're going."
"We can make some educated guesses. We know how far it is from Isbili to the coast of Anawak. And one thing we know is Anawak is a big isthmus that widens out the further north you go." The Moorish sailor pulled his furs tightly around himself. It was hard to tell if he was shivering, or just vibrating. "I would need charts. We know about how big the world is around. Let's assume we're sailing from Suzhou to a spot on the west coast of Anawak and back again. We'd calculate for that distance and assume we could resupply when we got there. It'd be dangerous, but...."
"....But it could be done," murmured Tailan.
"If we can get off this rock," Ibn Sa'id added.
"If we can get off this rock." Tailan sagged slightly.
~
1554 AD
It was by far the biggest
taa'un[12] Cumshewa had ever caught. Wrenching his spear out of the gigantic fish, he and the three other men struggled with the slippery mass of it. The canoe churned under them as they fought to wrestle it up over the side, but with a little effort and an assist from a forked bone-and-cedar fishhook, they finally managed to leverage the monster up and over.
"Thing fought like a warrior!" panted young Guujaaw as he sagged back in the canoe, lathered and mopping his brow. "I thought he was going to flip us over!"
"At that size, it might," Cumshewa laughed as he gave the fish a once-over. "How heavy you think, Yaahl?"
"About as much as a good-sized kid!" quipped the broad-faced man with a toothy grin.
"Hey now, go easy on Guujaaw now!"
An uproar of laughter lifted the spirits of the four tired fishermen - well, Cumshewa, Yaahl and Hlagwaats, anyway. Guujaal, barely past his sixteenth year, affected a sulk and looked off to one side.
The sulk quickly broke way to surprise. "
That wasn't there before."
Still chuckling, Cumshewa followed the look off to the west, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand. The laughter quickly faded as he tried to make sense of what the young man had seen.
It was as though a small island were approaching out of the fog, crowned by an array of flags and banners - yellow, he could tell from this distance. Cumshewa forgot about the fish in that moment as he rose in the canoe and squinted towards the horizon to try and make it out.
"What is it?" Hlaagwaats grunted, reaching for one of the fishing spears.
"I don't know. I've never seen an island ride the currents." Cumshewa frowned deeply. "And it's coming closer."
The four baffled fishermen looked on in disbelief at the unbelievable sight as the apparent island bore down. The closer it came, the more Cumshewa could make out - and the more he realized it wasn't actually an island. Yet it did nothing to mitigate the immensity of it. He'd always thought his canoe was pretty impressive, but the thing approaching them dwarfed it. If it was a ship, it was by far the biggest he'd ever seen, driven on not by oars but by some other force, banners rippling and booming above a hull seemingly carved from entire trees.
Before long, the island-canoe had nearly borne down on them - it was close enough that they could see its hull scarred and battered, its banners tattered around the edges and patched in places. And they could see men rushing about upon the massive rock of the boat, clad in clothing he could barely find words for. One of them, a pale-faced man with short hair, shouted something down at them and waved his arms.
"What?" a rather overwhelmed Cumshewa yelled back.
The man yelled something across the distance away. It might as well have been a bunch of birds babbling at each other, for all he could understand it.
"I can't understand you," Cumshewa shouted, more slowly.
The man on the boat held his hands up in frustration before rushing back onto the deck. For his part, Cumshewa blinked, then flopped back to his seat and looked back at the other three. "What do you think?"
"I think it's a giant island full of magicians," Guujaaw shot back immediately, cheeks pale. "Maybe we should leave before they destroy us. Who knows what they were shouting?"
"I think they look pretty tired," Hlaagwaats grunted more levelly.
The other three blinked at him. The brawnier fisherman shrugged and lowered his spear. "Look at their big flags. They're torn. Look at the logs on their boat. They've been through something. And they came out of the sunset. It must be hard to come from the sunset to here."
Cumshewa looked back towards the giant boat. None of the other men aboard had shouted anything else, though he could see two of them talking closely near the front of the island-craft. With a frown, he reached for his oar.
"Maybe they're lost," he guessed. "We can at least try to help them."
The other three fishermen stared at him a moment - but soon enough, they too reached for the oars. The single canoe paddled towards the gigantic island-boat, dwarfed, yet mostly unafraid.
~
THIS WAS PLACED HERE WITH AID OF NARA TAILAN AND HIS COMPANIONS, BY WUYA TOUZI WHO IS CHIEF OVER THE LAND OF FUXIAO,[13] IN THE NAME OF THE GREAT EMPEROR DIZONG OF WU
[1] Al-Andalus.
[2] Nara Tailan is what we'd know as a Haixi Jurchen, albeit one who has become somewhat Sinicized and adapted to a maritime life.
[3] Bent Horn - the Golden Horn Bay, e.g. Vladivostok
[4] "Fish-skin Dazi" - a Chinese term applied to Jurchen-adjacent ethnic groups like the Nanai and Nivkh peoples, so picked because of an apparent tendency to make clothing out of fish skin.
[5] The Wu maintain a small fort at Tyr, near the mouth of the Amur.
[6] Japan.
[7] Steller's sea eagle.
[8] Eagle Point - the southernmost tip of Kamchatka. In general, Yingdian is what the Wu refer to as the Kuril Islands.
[9] There's no real writing system for Kuril Ainu. Tailan's attempt to translate here is the first attempt to even try.
[10] Steller's sea cow allegedly tasted like corned beef, which neither Tailan nor Ibn Sa'id have ever eaten.
[11] The Otter Rock Islands - Little Tayan refers to Medny Island.
[12] The Haida word for a Chinook salmon.
[13] Haida Gwaii. The name 'Wuya Touzi' is the Chinese explorers trying to get a Sinicized form of 'chief of the Raven tribe.'
SUMMARY:
1542: Nara Tailan's First Expedition brings him to restore contact with Wanjiao Bay in the northernmost Wu reaches.
1546: Nara Tailan's Second Expedition reaches the northern Ainu living in Yingdian.
1550: Nara Tailan's Third Expedition wrecks in the Tayan Islands, but he manages to escape on a repaired ship.
1554: Nara Tailan, on his Fourth Expedition, completes the first Chinese voyage to the Gharb al-Aqsa by following the North Pacific gyre to Haida Gwaii. A stele is raised there with the consent of the strongest of the Haida chiefs.