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cheaper than elsewhere. In Oman in 1978 Martin found that a shu'i of only 20 tons cost $US21,000, and the motor another $5,000. The hull, cabin and toilet were of teak from India, the mast was dakl wood from Malabar, and the interior used mango wood from the south Indian coast. These boats were used for fishing, yet at this time, in the late 1970s, one could buy a 12 foot aluminium boat with an outboard for $900. Oman then clearly had priced itself out of the market, as indeed had the Gulf generally. The main centre in India is located at the estuary of the Beypore river, 10 km south of Calicut. Teak logs are floated down from inland to make the hulls. The clients however are mostly Arabs. In 1978 Martin watched them building a boom of 500 tonnes for a Kuwaiti merchant. The cost was $US63,000, without an engine, and construction took 18 months. This is obviously considerably cheaper than the cost of construction in Oman.27

In the Malay world sailing ships survive in certain niche areas. In eastern Indonesia there are still many working praus, most of them now with engines, though there also are engineless sloops called lambo.28 While even in 1884–1910 steamers carried more than 95 per cent of the traffic in Indonesia, praus continued and continue to feed in to the major steamer routes, just as they do on the Swahili coast also, and some continue to peddle their way around the islands.

Two recent accounts of voyages on dhows give some impression of travel today, which could be put alongside Villiers' classic narrative. Gavin Young went on a 60 foot cargo dhow called the Al Raza from Dubai to Karachi. The crew were all Baluchi, including the nakhoda, except for one old Iranian and the helmsman, who was Indian born. It had a 380 hp Japanese motor, which however was very erratic, so that they cannibalised the motors of the cars carried as cargo to fix up the dhow motor. Later the dynamo on the dhow engine failed, so they had to run the engine of one of the cars all the time to generate electricity to run lights.29

In the mid 1990s Mackintosh-Smith went from Yemen to Suqutra in a new ten metre, six ton sambuk, with a total number of passengers and crew of twenty-three. The vessel was teak below the waterline, but the rest was cheaper hardwood, and the deck was pine. The voyage took two nights and one day. The deck was crowded with boxes, oil drums, ropes and anchors. The nakhoda, Salim, set up a rudimentary compass, in a box secured by being nailed into the deck. However, he knew the stars well, and also steered to take account of currents. The vessel had a 33 horsepower Japanese motor, and the lateen sails were used only in emergencies. By sail the voyage would have taken at least five days.30

Islands should be seen as the quintessential maritime locations. Horden and Purcell, writing about the Mediterranean, claim they are not really the stereotype of being isolated and remote: rather they have all-round 'connectivity'. They are especially accessible to the seaborne, and in a way are coastal areas writ large. Richard Grove wrote of Indian Ocean islands as 'Edens' where new European ideas about nature and conservation were stimulated.31 Several of the themes we have touched on earlier are exaggerated and magnified when we look at them in an island context.

Many of the islands were uninhabited until Europeans arrived and used them for plantations, especially sugar, but also coffee, tea, spices, coconuts. The colonial powers brought in labour: at first black African slaves, and then indentured labour. This has often bequeathed to the islands at independence complex social problems, as in Mauritius where the majority of the population are descendants of people from India. Relations between them and the creole population are often tense. There was also tension in Zanzibar, until the old Arab elite was dispossessed in the revolution of 1964. In Madagascar the Merina people of the highlands, descendants of Malayo-Polynesian migrants, remain separate from the coastal people of African descent. There also have been massive