Excerpt from a Warning about the Malabar Coast
“... sales have been bountiful, praise be to God, and a full inventory of cargo will follow this letter. The nakhudha tells
me he intends to take on additional archers and fighting men for the return journey. Apparently, the raiders off the Malabar
Coast have been more of a plague than usual, some say because harvests in the region have been poor. I saw no such pirates
on the trip here but have heard plenty of tales. While the people of India practice a great diversity of faiths, old communities
of Muslims, Jews, and Christians along with those who worship local deities and various Brahmanical devotions—all disavow
the crafty Malabar pirates who till their fields in one season and ‘till’ the seas in other; if by ‘till’ one means taking
to the ocean in a vast flotilla of rafts, dugouts, and speedy cutters to harvest any merchant ship that strays too close.
It is a family affair, the villages emptying out and wives and children doing their part. The raiders are astonishingly clever
with boats; there is nothing they cannot make seaworthy; it is said some of them have survived months floating upon but a
bare piece of lumber, so talented they are in maritime endurance. They can row for days and send an arrow through the eye
of a lookout from a frightening distance away.
As their children are born into such a life, they make for prized captives, as worthy as a steppe-lad who being placed in a saddle from toddlerhood makes a most excellent Mamluk.
Our nakhudha says he once owned such a slave, a Malabar youth seized when he was an adolescent who grew into the most talented boatman the nakhudha had ever known.
In the raiders’ hearts, however, deceit cannot be rooted out.
After a decade of service, the slave turned on his master and the straight path of guidance he had offered in favor of some cursed crew of bandits led by a woman. The ingratitude of it all!”