Dhow

A dhow is the general English name for a family of traditional sailing vessels of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, carrying one or more masts rigged with settee or lateen sails, used for centuries along the coasts of Eastern Arabia, Iran, East Africa, Yemen and South Asia. Most scholars trace the vessel to India sometime between roughly 600 BC and 600 AD, though the exact history is unsettled, and Hadhrami and Omani traders later commissioned dhows from shipwrights on India's Malabar coast, which supplied both skilled labor and timber. Dhows carried heavy cargo such as dates, fresh water and general merchandise along Indian Ocean trade routes, and in the nineteenth century they were also used to carry enslaved people across the Indian Ocean as part of the East African slave trade centered on Zanzibar, a role documented alongside the vessel's more common merchant trade. Variants of the dhow are still built and sailed today, though motorized engines have largely replaced sail on working vessels.