Nautical Research Journal 55


1. Small dhows at Doha. Courtesy of Jaseem Hamza.


Indus to the Gulf: T e trading dhows of the Indian Ocean, 1750-1900.


By Ishraq Ahmed Hashmi


T e dhow became one of the longest-lived and most fl exible ships in the history of the Indian Ocean between 1750 and 1900. Constructed in Sindh, Gujarat, and Oman, and making embarkation as distant as Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf, dhows were no mere carriers of dates, ivory, rice, and pearls only. T ey also played the role of cultural, linguistic, and religious exchanges that served in bringing together a maritime world many years ago before the emergence of the steamships.


T is article design,


construction, and


follows the development of dhow rigging in the


perspectives of a century and a half of trade, both locally and internationally. It uses the results of


traveler reports, naval journals and documents of archives of Bombay, Oman, and Zanzibar to recreate how the dhows worked out, including the types of boats, like the baghala, boom and sambuk. T ey are also analyzed in detail: the shape of their hulls, the type of their sails, and their cargo hold, and especially the data that model shipbuilders want to know.


T is location of the dhow within the context of the economic relationships of the Indian Ocean, as well as the lives of the nomadic communities constituting the population which constructed and used it, allows the study to voice the notion of a unique combination of functionality and fl exibility and emotional representation as well as the embodiment of these vessels as bearers of symbolic value. T e paper is also a discussion of the persistence of the dhow in the life of maritime historians and modelers who deal with the issue of how to construct a type of ship that may lack representation in Western naval sources.


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