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By Dhow Along the Zanzibar Coast

As we raced northward under the setting sun I watched the coast of Zanzibar pass by in the darkening evening. The mangrove estuary was now flooded with high tide and many of the ships we'd admired in dry dock now floated idly in the shallow water. We heeled over slightly in the stiff breeze, but the dhow trimmed nicely along the waterline. Issa adjusted the thick mainsheet incessantly, going for that very last bit of performance from his wooden craft. Out of habit, my eyes surveyed the bilge and the wooden keel, looking for pooling water. It was dry as a bone.


Growing up in and around an 18' Herreshoff America catboat and a lot of other sailboats instilled me with a great respect for sailing craft and the people who sail them. So while we explored the African island of Zanzibar it was a great pleasure to finally experience the great wooden dhows that ply the Swahili coast. The Persians first introduced the dhow to East Africa before the time of Christ, and the regular monsoon winds blowing eastward from the Indian Ocean made it a natural for sailing on a broad reach up and down the coast of East Africa under sweeping gossamer lateen rig.

We visited a shipyard tucked at the high water line of a mangrove estuary, just meters from the ruins of the pleasure palaces of the last Sultan of Zanzibar. There in the cool shadows of the immense mango trees that defined the shipyard, Zanzibari sailors built and restored the wooden craft that have so characterized East Africa since Periplus of the Erythraen Sea mentioned them in the second century AD. Their tools were unabashedly simple: a drill run by a leather corded bow and a spindle, long iron nails with copper plates, and sails cut from thin canvas sacking and fit with nylon cord for strength. The shipyard was filled with the dull thud of hammer blows and the scratching of hand saws, but not one single electric tool was in use.

We struck a deal with a young man by the name of Omar to take us out into the Zanzibar Strait in his dhow, and met him late that afternoon on the porcelain-sand beach where he had moored. His first mate Issa greeted us in Swahili, we slipped the mooring, hoisted the enormous lateen sail, and were free. The late afternoon breeze stiffened as the sun bathed Stone Town in shades of gold and mahogany.

Lateen craft are fantastically simple, but from the point of view of a sailor dealing with multiple compass points of wind, inefficient. Fortunately, in Zanzibar, the wind blows half the year from one direction and the other half from the other. I watched in amazement as we sailed. The mast was a single cut length of wood, slightly irregular shaped from the way the tree had grown. It was pierced at the top to permit the halyard - a thick, blue, nylon cord - to pass through; the halyard's other end was knotted around a bulwark midships. The mast had been fitted into a half round chock along the keel with a small, square key.

A single stay on the windward side bolstered the mast against the pressure of the wind. The sail had been stitched to a thin wooden gaff - actually two pieces of wood fastened together - and hung from the halyard with its throat pressed close up against the mast. The entire length of sail had been stitched to a length of 3/8" rope to stiffen it.

As we raced northward under the setting sun I watched the coast of Zanzibar pass by in the darkening evening. The mangrove estuary was now flooded with high tide and many of the ships we'd admired in dry dock now floated idly in the shallow water. We heeled over slightly in the stiff breeze, but the dhow trimmed nicely along the waterline. Issa adjusted the thick mainsheet incessantly, going for that very last bit of performance from his wooden craft. Out of habit, my eyes surveyed the bilge and the wooden keel, looking for pooling water. It was dry as a bone.

The Zanzibari ship builders use a hard wood called Mninga, which grows naturally along the shoreline. They bend the ship's ribs slowly over a charcoal fire. Every rib had a slightly different shape on the inside and still showed the rough cut marks where they had been hewn, but the hull was smooth on the outside. The wooden planks of the hull are caulked with cotton strings soaked in "kalafati" coconut oil. The art of shipbuilding was unwritten, and was passed in the ancient way from master to apprentice.

As the sun lowered over the islets offshore I noted the ship had no running lights of any kind. Neither did it have a compass, radio, oars, or much of anything else, just the heavy wooden rudder tracing a graceful V in the turquoise water behind us. Omar pressed the little tiller over to one side and Issa let out the sail. We headed into the sunset with the wind. Omar led us into a jibe, and we headed for home.

The jibe was when I realized how specialized lateen rig was for running along a coast on a reach. Passing the gaff from one side of the mast to the other meant setting the sail and manually lifting the gaff up and over, passing the mainsheet around the mast and refitting it on the other side of the ship, then letting the sail catch the wind again. It was laborious and inefficient; I wouldn't have wanted to tack in that craft. I asked Omar where they took their dhow.

"Fishing along the reef," he told me, "or along the coast." The monsoon winds guaranteed him a beam wind. The larger dhows still exist, and sail cargo from Zanzibar to the mainland or the other Zanzibari island of Pemba. These mashua dhows remain unchanged since the time of Christ. The really big jahazi dhows - up to 15 meters along the water line - are much less common.

The sun set just as we approached the shore, where a half dozen ngalawa outrigger craft already lie in shadows. They were identical to the little sailing craft I'd admired on the shore of Flores (Indonesia) in 1993. We slid up onto the shoreline with barely a whisper. On the shore, the cooking fires had already been lit and the prawns and octopus were marinading in island spices. As I watched the stars emerge from the darkening sky, like the sailors of old, I knew I had arrived home.

Note: An improved version of this story was pubished in Wooden Boat Magazine issue 203 (July/Aug 2008).

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