Dhow is a European catchall for Indian Ocean ships with triangular lateen sails; the word probably comes from Swahili for vessel, and local sailors used specific names such as markab, khashab, and falukah, related to the Quranic fulk for Noah’s Ark. The basic design likely arose in India between 600 BC and 600 AD, long before Portuguese caravels arrived in the late 15th century, which rules out the myth that the sambuk came from them. The oldest surviving type is the Somali beden, and Somali traders carried frankincense, myrrh, and gold to Egypt, Babylon, and farther east. In 1414 they brought a live giraffe to the Ming court of the Yongle Emperor, possibly transferring it to Zheng He’s fleet, a feat made possible by deep keels and heavy ballast.

For centuries Hadhrami Yemenis and Omanis sailed to Beypore in Kerala, India for custom hulls of rot resistant teak whose planks were sewn together with coconut coir rather than nailed, a flexible hull the Malayalam language calls uru that absorbs shocks from waves and reefs. By the 1920s Al Hudaydah in Yemen built smaller acacia wood coastal dhows with movable sails for the Red Sea’s erratic winds. Navigators measured the pole star with the kamal, a wooden block on a knotted string held in the teeth, and trade followed the monsoon: south in winter, north after the winds reversed, with long waits that built multicultural port cities. Types included the cargo baghlah, or mule, the boom with its tapering stern, and the broad jahazi used for pearl diving around Bahrain and Oman.

• Dhows appear throughout the stories of the Thousand and One Nights and powered the Persian Gulf pearl trade.
• Arab booms keep a high sweeping prow, while Indian versions trim it down.
• Dhows also carried the Red Sea and Indian Ocean slave trades, and Captain G. L. Sullivan’s 1873 book details Royal Navy patrols against them.
• Alan Villiers sailed on dhows in the late 1930s, and some still carry dates and fish to East Africa and mangrove timber back.
• Kuwait’s Al Hashemi II holds the Guinness record as the largest wooden dhow but has never floated.