The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [198]
It is true that traditional sailing ships have lost much of their role. In Aden in the early 1960s on average about 6,000 ships called each year, with total net registered cargoes of about 30 million tons, and on average 1,400 dhows, total cargoes about 135,000 net tons.22 Yet it is appropriate to make the point that the broad category of ships called dhows has always changed. Nails began to replace coir some centuries ago, different woods have been used depending on availability, and some modern navigation methods have been adopted. Most important, today virtually all dhows have engines, though usually for reasons of cost sail is used when the winds are favourable. Prados showed how some types of dhows have changed and so displaced other types. He concentrates on the Yemeni types known as huri and sanbuq. These have got bigger and more efficient. The 'lack of dimensional constraints, coupled with the growth in seafood popularity – resulting from increased refrigeration capabilities to improved road networks – has pushed the huwari to greater proportions.' The result is that 'the modern sanbuq may be as responsible for the extinction of traditional, regional vessel types as the steel freighter and glassfibre launch.' Among the changes he describes are the use of paint to avoid fouling of the hull, as compared with the traditional method of smearing every two months or so a combination of boiled animal or fish fat and crushed lime. A shortage of trees has meant that boats made of planks, rather than dugouts, are now the norm. Nearly all boats now have transoms on which to mount outboards, they go out fishing for longer, and preserve the catch for a few days in fibreglass boxes with ice. Different woods are used: instead of teak, pine is often used, or a sort of red hardwood called zinjil. Wider connections are revealed when we find that the former comes from Italy or even Sweden, the latter from India or Java! Even the last of the sewn craft used nylon thread rather than coir, and had a transom for an outboard.23
On the East African coast dhows, in this case more correctly jahazi, ended their trade to the Gulf in the 1980s. The cargoes had been mangrove poles, and this trade declined due to environmental concerns. But some are still being built, and they trade today up and down the coast, some carrying passengers and many doing some smuggling.24 In the Gulf both local and ocean-going dhows are now motorised. Some carry pilgrims, some dates. The motors have cut passage times in half, and also the sizes of crews. When only sail was involved large numbers were needed to handle unwieldy lateen sails, and others came along partly as passengers who wanted to do petty trade, and would help out with the sailing as needed.25
The centre of the dhow trade today is on the west coast of India. Dhows here remained viable because they focused on smuggling restricted goods into India in the years when the Indian economy was closely regulated, that is up to the late 1980s. The dhows involved, about 45 feet long, looked small and scruffy, perhaps deliberately so, for they usually had two large and powerful engines. Large amounts of gold came in from Dubai each year. In 1981 an Indian dhow was caught smuggling from the Gulf to India. It had a cargo of no less than 8,807 Japanese and Swiss watches. Other dhows carry humble products, such as timber and building materials, from say Kerala to Mumbai: in 1976–77 the number of dhows entering Mumbai was 13,436, mostly coming from somewhere else on the west Indian coast.26
The centre of dhow construction today is also on the Indian west coast, for here they can be built much