Ferocious by nature, ‘the Indian’ also has a brighter facet, and its dark side slowly fades away as one escapes the high latitudes and heads North, as winds get milder - yet the respite can be short-lived, as around the Equator and back in the Northern Hemisphere, monsoon and tornado wind systems are active. Cyclones can wreak havoc on the shores of the Arabian sea, as the Sultanate of Oman painfully experienced in 2007 when the infamous Gonu struck, leaving a trail of destruction and human losses. One can easily understand why ‘the Indian’, displaying violent tempers both in the North and in the South (albeit in a different fashion), holds a place apart in maritime imagery and folklore. Curious phenomena have been observed - or at least consigned in log books - as the aforementioned Alan Villiers reports in “Monsoon Seas: the story of the Indian Ocean”, published in 1952. “The extraordinary “milk sea”, for instance, has frequently been seen. The whole sea seems to boil with light and ships to sail upon liquid fire. Frank Bullen, in his voyage around the world in the New Bedford whaler he immortalised as the Cachalot, speaks of this. ‘It was a lovely night {he has written} with scarcely any wind, the stars trying to make up for the absence of the moon by shining with intense brightness. The water had been more phosphorescent than usual, so that every little fish left left a track of light behind him greatly disproportionate to his size. As the night wore on the sea grew brighter and brighter, until by midnight we seemed to be sailing in a sea of lambent flames. Every little wave that broke against the ship’s side sent up a shower of diamondlike spray, wonderfully beautiful to see, while a passing school of porpoises fairly set the sea blazing as they leaped and gamboled in its glowing waters. Looking up from sea to sky, the latter seemed quite black instead of blue… In that shining flood the blackness of the ship stood out in startling contrast, and when we looked over the side our faces were strangely lit up by the brilliant glow. For several hours this beautiful appearance persisted, fading away at last as gradually as it came’. Other ships have reported this same phenomenon, some speaking of passing through areas of intense light 15 and 20 miles long”, notes Villiers. “Phosphorescence at sea is well known elsewhere, but the tiny Noctiluca of the Indian Ocean excels itself as an agent for lighting the sea.”

On its western boundary, marked by Cape Agulhas and not Cape of Good Hope as the common misconception has it, the Indian ocean shows another example of its disturbed nature, as the Agulhas current (flowing from east to west) opposes the prevailing winds, allowing for the sudden formation of massive and steep waves… the area is now known as one of the high-risk zones as far as rogue waves are concerned. Other strange phenomenon occur below the southern tip of Africa, and the meeting of warm subtropical and cold Antarctic air masses generate unusual cloud formations and even optical illusions. Some authors, and Villiers certainly is one of them, have argued that these clouds are the most likely explanation behind the legend of the ghost ship Flying Dutchman, which is doomed to sail the oceans forever, after having sunk off the Cape of Good Hope. Recently, scientists have come up with another theory, explaining that the ‘looming’ effect was probably to blame: when rays of light are bent across different refractive indices, a ship appearing on the horizon can be perceived as floating above the sea surface… Even if this takes away the magic from the legend, one thing remains certain: the Flying Dutchman, arguably the most famous sea myths of them all, was born out of the Indian Ocean and nowhere else, at the threshold of which for centuries mariners started to feel their animal instinct warning them of perils to come…

Facts…

• The Indian is the third largest of the world’s five oceans.

• It is bordered by Cape Agulhas longitude (west) and that of the southern tip of Tasmania (east).

• Its tributary water bodies include the Andaman Sea, the Arabian Sea,  the Gulf of Oman, the Bay of Bengal, the Great Australian Bight, the Gulf of Aden, the Laccadive Sea, the Mozambique Channel, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Strait of Malacca.

• Average depth: 3900 metres.

Bibliography

Alan J. Villiers - “Vanished fleets” (1932), “Monsoon Seas” (1952)

Frank T. Bullen - “The cruise of the Cachalot” (1891)

Isabelle Autissier - “Letter to the Indian” , Attitude Voile #2, (1999)