From these few instances you may see why my novel was postponed while I read about Arab prowess at sea. My discoveries paralleled those of the Vikings. The Vikings and the Arabs spent a century or two scaring the hell out of each other on the high seas, and very little has been written about this.
The Vikings thought the Arab sail masters were conjurers who manipulated the winds, because the lateen-rigged Arab ships were light and could sail on the wind, unlike the Vikings’ dragon ships which needed a following wind, just as the classical galleys had. The Arabs, for their part, described the Vikings as giants with holes in their eyes through which one could see the skies.


These two seafaring peoples clashed on the Atlantic, on the North Sea, in the Baltic, on the Danube, on the Volga, on the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean. They took each other captive, they traded, and eventually they were correctly perceived by Rome as a threat to the church. Viking prisoners became Muslims and went to sea under green banners, and Arab prisoners became paganized and sailed on Viking galleys.


It’s the stuff of great books, but few have been written. What teen-aged boy wouldn’t be interested in this rambunctious prisoner trade, this swashbuckling adventure? I, a middle-aged man, was enthralled. I read translations of Viking accounts and Arab accounts. It was apparent that they had spooked each other far more than the Soviets ever spooked the West or NATO ever scared the Soviets.


My novel was about an Arab-American merchant seaman. He was awarded the Navy’s Silver Star for bravery in Korea. He would be our literature’s first Arab-American protagonist. A former frogman, he would find the world’s first caravel wreck off the Omani coast and be befriended by its autocratic former sultan. But the book languished as my research heated up. I loved the smidgeons of knowledge I was pocketing. I dreaded the day when I would have to put it aside.


It took me 15 years to write that book. Today, Light Piercing Water, as I call it, remains unpublished, and I remain as enthused about its research as I was when I started it. “Artists Hill,” a non-marine section of the book, adapted by my wife Marilyn as a short story, won Literal Latté’s first prize in fiction, so I have some reason to think the book is worth a reader’s time. And when I let my imagination run wild I imagine a copy ending up on the shelves of Abu Dhabi’s new maritime museum.


There is a world of Arab seafaring to be laid out before our eyes. There are wrecks, treasures, rutters, accounts, and much more. Today Arab coins are often found in Stockholm’s harbor or in the Danube. And it is likely that many a blue-eyed North African owes his sky eyes to a Viking captive of long ago.


Sometimes I think the proposed title of my book, Light Piercing Water, is the appropriate description for what ought to be done to balance the history books, to show the Arabs in their true light as mariners. We must pierce the dark waters of historical bias and omission. We must give credit where it is due. The Arabs were not only adventurous sailors, but long before the Portuguese and Spanish they were seafaring capitalists, a message that is clear in the Sindbad tales and yet obscured by our exoticization of the tales. And there is much more to be said about that, because the seafaring Arab merchants were not, for the most part, plunderers, as were the Spanish, but traders, practicing a moral capitalism from which we could draw some lessons ourselves.


The Abu Dhabis will name their maritime museum, but I choose to think its name is Light Piercing Water.—Djelloul Marbrook


The passions that hijack us[/QUOTE]