MACCHA-YANTRA – THE ANCIENT INDIAN MARINER’S COMPASS
=============
There were Sanskrit terms for many parts of a ship. The ship’s anchor was known as Nava-Bandhan-Kilaha which literally means ‘A Nail to tie up a ship’ . The sail was called Vata Vastra a which means ‘wind-cloth’. The hull was termed StulaBhaga i.e. an’expanded area’. The rudder was called Keni-Pata, Pata means blade; the rudder was also known as Karna which literally means a ‘ear’ and was so called because it used to be a hollow curved blade, as is found today in exhaust fans. The ship’s keel was called Nava-Tala which means ‘bottom of a ship’. The mast was known as Kupadanda, in which danda means a pole.
Even a sextant was used for navigation and was called Vruttashanga-Bhaga. But what is more surprising is that even a contrived mariner’s compass was used by Indian navigators nearly 1500 to 2000 years ago. This claim is not being made in an overzealous nationalistic spirit. This has in fact been the suggestion of an European expert, Mr. J.L. Reid, who was a member of the Institute of Naval Architects and Shipbuilders in England at around the beginning of the present century. This is what Mr. Reid has said in the Bombay Gazetteer.

“The early Hindu astrologers are said to have used the magnet, in fixing the North and East, in laying foundations, and other religious ceremonies. The Hindu compass was an iron fish that floated in a vessel of oil and pointed to the North. The fact of this older Hindu compass seems placed beyond doubt by the Sanskrit word Maccha Yantra, or fish machine, which Molesworth gives as a name for the mariner’s compass”.
It is significant to note that these are the words of a foreign Naval Architect and Shipbuilding Expert. It is thus quite possible that the Maccha Yantra (fish machine) was transmitted to the west by the Arabs to give us the mariner’s compass of today.

Indian shipping has thus had a long and brilliant history covering a period of about five millennia from the very dawn of India’s civilization in the Indus Valley. Both Hindu and Buddhistic texts are thus replete with references to the sea-borne trade of India that directly and indirectly demonstrate the existence of a national shipping and shipbuilding. It was one of the great national key industry of India. Indeed, all the evidence available clearly shows that for full thirty centuries India stood at the very heart of the commercial world, cultivating trade relations successively with the Phoenicians, Jews, Assyrians, Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans in ancient times, and Turks, Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch and English in modern times.