A Reexamination of Bat Cat Vang and the Hoang Sa Squadron:Focusing on Routes,Ship Speeds,and Shipwrecks from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
This article follows the logic of"landforms-maritime routes-ports-ship speed-shipwrecks and salvage"and applies map range finding techniques using the maps in Compilation of the Tiannan Region Maps(纂集天南四至路图),all of which were the result of substantive surveys,to calculate the shallow shoals and sandy reefs along the coast of Vietnam in the northern part of South China Sea where Bai Cat Vang,turned into the infamous Oxhorn shaped Pracel marked on western maps before the 1830s.By calculating ship speeds,this article concludes that the wind disturbances and maritime disasters recorded from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century mainly occurred in this area.The Oxhorn shaped Pracel served as the traditional demarcation between internal passage and external passage,from west to east.The northern part of Pracel,including Champo Island or Cùlao Chàm and the present Đ(a)o Lý So'n,witnessed numerous maritime accidents,and became a major site for the Hoang Sa Squadron to salvage sunken ships in the eighteenth century.None of the evidence presented by Vietnam can prove that Vietnamese ships or Hoang Sa Squadron had ever reached as far as the present-day Xisha Islands.
Bai Cat VangHoang Sa SquadronOxhom shaped Pracelmaritime routesship speedshipwrecks
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