The Dhow

Come with us to the Bazaruto Archipelago

The Dhow

For more than two thousand years, lateen rigged dhows have been sailing the Indian Ocean, linking economies and people, and creating a cosmopolitan maritime Indian Ocean culture. While trade was the primary rationale, a great variety of people used dhows to cross the oceans: sailors, merchants and settlers. In former days, dhows transported slaves, religious refugees and conquerors.
For centuries, Arab shipwrights crafted boats using sewn construction – sewing the planks together with coconut fibre cord – but this craft has more or less died out, being superseded by nailed construction.