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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The centre of dhow construction today is also on the Indian west coast, for here they can be built much 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ecological changes in the islands. Native woodlands
have been replaced by plantation crops, and this has often led to erosion; feral dogs and cats have destroyed native wild life; pigs and monkeys, along with humans, rendered the dodo on Mauritius extinct by the 1670s. So also with the giant tortoise of the Seychelles, or nearly so. Suqutra has been isolated for much of its history until recently. Today the dragon's blood tree, source of a resin once widely used in medicine as an astringent, is threatened with extinction. There are no young trees on Suqutra today, because of livestock grazing.
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Proceeding roughly west to east, and south to north, Zanzibar was ruled by Omani sultans through the nineteenth century, though British power increasingly intruded on their autonomy. Society was thoroughly stratified, with a ruling elite who claimed Arab origin. Below them were Muslims who could not convincingly claim Arab descent, and below them descendants of slaves. But the commercial sector, including many government posts, was controlled by Indians, usually Muslims of some description and hailing from Kutch. Zanzibar became independent in 1963, and in 1964, after a bloody revolution, merged with Tanganyika to make the new nation of Tanzania. The revolution displaced the Arab elite, and both they and the Indians often chose to leave. Here and elsewhere a situation owing much to the past wishes of the colonial powers, in this case Britain with its indirect control, left a precarious situation at independence.
Madagascar perhaps should not be considered as an island, for it is larger than many landed states. We can merely point out that the island, ethnically very diverse, was a French colony from 1896. Its history since independence in 1960 has been a chequered one, and now the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund play something of a colonial role in 'advising' the various governments on their economic and social policies.
The four main islands of the Comoros again contain strong ethnic divisions. When Arabs arrived a millennium ago they found a population divided between Malayo-Polynesian people and Swahili-speaking Africans. These divisions produced a situation where one of the four, Mayotte, was mostly populated by Malayo-Polynesian people who had come from Madagascar, as compared with the other three, who had the same Afro-Arab mixture as the Swahili coast. France took over all four islands in the late nineteenth century, but at independence in 1975 Mayotte chose to remain part of metropolitan France. The recent history of the other three has been a turbulent one, with several coups and mercenaries sometimes playing a deciding role. The Comoros, like Zanzibar, have often stressed their Islamic credentials. In 1993 the three islands became a member of the League of Arab States.
Both the Comoros and Madagascar had been settled long before the Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean, and this contrasts strongly with the next set of islands we will look at, which were uninhabited. These are the Mascarene islands: Reunion, Mauritius and the Seychelles.
The Portuguese visited Mauritius in the sixteenth century, and the Dutch twice tried to establish a settlement colony there. However, permanent European control came only when the French took the island in 1721. They quickly established sugar plantations, and brought in large numbers of African slaves to work them. In the late
eighteenth century the population consisted of 6,000 whites, 3,700 free people, most of whom were Indian, and nearly 50,000 slaves. Britain took the island in 1810, during the Napoleonic wars, and in 1835 abolished slavery. Over the next eighty years some 450,000 indentured Indian labourers were introduced. The island became independent in 1968. There are strong ethnic and religious divisions. Over half the population are Indian Hindus, about 30 per cent are creoles and Europeans, 16 per cent are Muslim, and about 3 per cent are of Chinese-Mauritian background. The sugar economy, in effect
the
economy for some two centuries, is still dominated by a Franco-Mauritian elite, at least in the large estate sector, but Indian and creole small-holders are numerous. Some 90 per cent of the island's cultivable land is under sugar.
While there certainly is some tension between the various groups just depicted, some have claimed that because everyone is a relatively new arrival, with no indigenous population, this is a relatively successful multicultural society of about 1,000,000 people. The linguistic situation reflects this, for the formal languages are English, French and standard Hindi, but the domestic languages are Mauritian Creole and Mauritian Bhojpuri.
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Most people speak three or four languages. The political system is more or less open and free.
This relative harmony is at least in part based on the way the economy has been able to make a transition from total reliance on just one export crop, sugar. Tourism, as we will see, has expanded rapidly, and more generally the government hopes that the island will become an Indian Ocean Singapore. To this end in 1970 they set up Export Processing Zones where textiles are produced: sugar now makes up only 23 per cent of export earnings. Investment in the zones was encouraged by such inducements as the forbidding of strikes, free repatriation of profits, and a ten-year income tax holiday. As a result foreign investment rose from $US11 million in 1998 to $US 47 million in 1999. Yet any export product can suffer fluctuations: in 1988 the European Union, which had provided guaranteed access for Mauritian textiles, decided that they were too successful, and restricted imports from there.
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Reunion hosts an equally complex mix of peoples. The island, along with the rest of the Mascarenes, was taken by the French. The British took all three of the areas early in the nineteenth century, but at the end of the Napoleonic wars gave Reunion back to France. It is now a Department of metropolitan France. The population includes people descended from migrants from Europe, Africa, India, China, Madagascar and Comoros. As in Mauritius, the sugar industry initially used slave labour, and later indentured Tamil Indians, who today make up about one-sixth of the total. Being part of France is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it means a large tourist influx, and a guaranteed market for sugar. On the other hand, wages are the same as in metropolitan France, and obviously then Reunion cannot compete with cheaper labour in the other islands. Consequently industry has failed to develop.
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