Beale discovers a new Afro-Asian trade route

The year 2001 was a wrenching one for Philip Beale: Shortly after his 40th birthday, his mother died.

The year 2001 was a wrenching one for Philip Beale: Shortly after his 40th birthday, his mother died. The money manager decided that it was time to try something he’d been contemplating for two decades: prove that eighth-century Indonesian sailors could have ventured as far abroad as West Africa.

So Beale resigned his job as head of pooled pensions at Morley Fund Management in London and commissioned shipbuilders in the Kangean Islands, 60 miles north of Bali, to create a 65-foot replica of an Indonesian trading ship. He had seen such a vessel 20 years before on a frieze at the Buddhist temple complex of Borobudur on Java.

Indonesians settled Madagascar and traded with what is today South Africa but most historians say they never braved the storm-tossed seas around the Cape of Good Hope to reach West Africa. Setting off last August 15, Beale, a former Royal Navy lieutenant, and a crew of ten managed to sail his ship -- named the Borobudur -- from Indonesia to East Africa via the Seychelles and Madagascar, then through the treacherous seas off the cape and up the west coast of Africa to Ghana. The trip took seven months.

“This is incredibly important for the history of Africa,” says the 43-year-old Beale, now back in the U.K. after his 11,000-mile voyage. “We Europeans think the story of Africa begins with Vasco da Gama. This opens up important new avenues of research.”

Made of teak and ironwood, the Borobudur displayed an impressive resilience. “I was always tremendously confident in her,” says the skipper. “Even when we were hit by storms in the Mozambique channel and some of the crew were asking what the hell we were doing, I never doubted she was up to it.”

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