Dhow is a European label that Arab and Indian sailors never used
Europeans sorted ships by their rigging, so every Indian Ocean vessel with the familiar angled sail became a dhow to them. The sailors who built and crewed these boats saw no single type at all; they had separate names for each design, told apart by size, hull shape and number of masts.
Dhows are traditional sailing vessels of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, typically long and slim, carrying heavy goods such as fruit and fresh water along the coasts of Arabia, Iran, East Africa and South Asia. Large ones need about thirty crew, small ones around twelve. The word itself is uncertain: it was once traced to Arabic or Persian, but most researchers now favour the Swahili daw, meaning vessel. In Arabic, ships go by general words such as markab or falūka, the latter related to the Quranic term for Noah's ark.
Origins are hazy. Most scholars place the dhow's birth in India sometime between 600 BC and 600 AD, rejecting the idea that it copied the Portuguese caravel, which reached the region only in the late 15th century. Somali traders sailed them to Egypt and Babylon with frankincense and myrrh, and in 1414 a giraffe was carried to the court of the Chinese emperor Yong Le, though some accounts credit Zheng He's fleet with that voyage. For centuries Yemeni and Omani merchants commissioned hulls at Beypore in Kerala, drawn by its timber, coir rope and shipwrights; planks were once stitched together with coconut rope.
The boats had a darker role too, carrying people in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades that the Royal Navy tried to stop. Among the named types, the baghlah, from the Arabic for mule, was the heavy deep-sea workhorse, while the sambuk, now the largest seen in the Persian Gulf, ranks among the most successful designs ever.
Sail-only dhows still ply the route between the Gulf and East Africa, riding the winter monsoon south with dates and fish and returning in early summer with mangrove timber. Their navigators traditionally used the kamal, gauging latitude from the Pole Star's height above the horizon. The captain and writer Alan Villiers sailed with them in 1938 and 1939 to record the trade.
Source: Dhow
