SEA ADVENTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 24

SEA ADVENTURE

ON THE INDIAN OCEAN

A VOYAGE IN A DHOW

Those who are looking for adventure which the sea still offers in 1939 and who want it for practically nothing will find it in a voyage in an Indian Ocean dhow, says a writer in the "New York Times." There are Arab skippers who will take the traveller across the ocean and from port to weird port at one-tenth the price of liner fare.

Voyagers must take their own bedding. And if they cannot exist on a diet of curry and rice, coffee, and dates, they must take their own food, too. Passengers must be prepared for an open-air life, since there are no cabins in the dhows, nO decks even, apart from the poop. Yet in these vessels, built to a design a thousand years old, men sail every year from India, the Persian Gulf, and Aden to Zanzibar and the East African coast. An engine has no place in <a dhow. From the eyes painted in the bows to ; the richly-carved stern, the dhow is a survival of the Arabian Nights era. It !is hard to detect a modern touch anywhere in her construction. Many of the "mtepe" class are sewn together ; with coconut fibre. In others wooden pegs are used instead of nails. | CRAFT OLD BUT STURDY. Nevertheless, there is nothing slip-

shod about these ancient and battered craft. They have to be strong, for their skippers have a way of taking short cuts through uncharted gaps in coral reefs. When they make a mistake the dhow is pounded by the sea, though she usually escapes with just a few more scars on the tough outer planks. A shipwreck in heavy weather is an unfortunate affair, as the dhows carry nothing larger than canoes as lifeboats.

Cyclones take heavy toll of the dhows, as a matter of fact, and scores of the smaller craft must founder every year without their losses being recorded. During one cyclone at Zanzibar (which is seldom reached by these revolving storms) a fleet of dhows hundreds strong was driven ashore, while the town was almost flattened out by the wind.

Zanzibar, when the north-east monsoon blows, is the great place to watch the dhows. The writer has identified dhows of every type, from every port from Muscat to Bombay, in that calm anchorage. There were huge "baggalas" up to 100 feet in length, with long prows and sterns like galleons. "Bedeni" from the Persian Gulf, those fast sailers with huge rudders. "Pattamars," with two masts, all the way from India. "Batili," long and low, easily recognised by their perpendicular stems. "Ganjas" from Cutch, "ukararus" from Tanganyika, light "tisharis" and small "jehazis" built in Pemba. THE MALDIVE CRAFT. Colombo harbour does not reveal the same variety in small craft,,, but that is the place to study the wonderful ■ dhows manned by Maldive Islanders. These primitive, remote people are among the most expert shipbuilders and navigators in the East. Their

dhows arrive in port with the most romantic cargoes carried in modern times—lacquer work and woven mats, midget coconuts, cowrie shells, native sweetmeats, coconut products, turtleshell, and dried bonito. Some of the larger Maldive dhows have figureheads copied from Portuguese and other sailing ships. The risks taken by men—and women, too —who venture to sea in cockleshells is well illustrated by the ordeal of a dhow from the Comoro Islands not long ago. This open dhow, only twenty feet in length, put out fron. one of the islands with eight men and one woman on board. They intended to visit a neighbouring island only a day's sail away. Eleven days later the. dhow sailed wearily into harbour at Lamu, a thousand miles to the north. She had been driven off Jier course by a sudden gale and those on board had seen no land until the wind and currents swept them towards Lamu. One man remained at the tiller. The rest were lying on the floor boards with swollen tongues and emaciated bodies, barely alive.