Sons of Sindbad: The Photographs.

Ehemaliges Bibliotheksexemplar daher Sticker auf Buchr�cken, kleinere handschriftlicher Anmerkungen im Vorsatz, Klebereste im Vorsatz, sonst ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar ohne Anstreichungen / Former library copy therefore sticker on spine, minor handwritten annotations in endpapers, glue residue in endpapers, otherwise a good and clean copy without markings. - Alan Villiers had already made a name for himself as a maritime adventurer in the 1920s and 1930s because, unusually, he combined his maritime skills with a great talent as a pioneering photojournalist. In 1938, when he first went to Arabia, he had just completed an epic three-year voyage around the world in his three-masted schooner, Joseph Conrad. He travelled to Arabia because he was certain that he was living through the last days of sail, and was determined to record as much of them as he was able. It seemed to him, after two decades at sea, that �as pure sailing craft carrying on their unspoilt ways, only the Arab remained�. Choosing Aden as his starting-point, Villiers looked around for Arab dhow masters prepared to take on a lone Westerner as a crewman. At Aden, he was put in touch with the captain of one of the great Kuwaiti booms then frequenting the port. Her captain, Nejdi, was making the age-old voyage from the Gulf to East Africa, coasting on the north-east monsoon winds with a cargo of dates from Basra. The return voyage would be made in the early summer of 1939, on the first breezes of the south-west monsoon, from East Africa to Kuwait with a cargo of mangrove poles. From this voyage, made by Arabia�s mariners from time immemorial, Villiers fashioned Sons of Sindbad. First published in 1940, this is the sole work of Arabian travel to place the seafaring Arabs centre-stage. It is a great classic of the genre to rank with Thesiger�s Arabian Sands, which it pre-dates by almost twenty years. Like Thesiger, Villiers travelled among his companions as an equal, deferring to their superior knowledge of their business, and observing at close quarters their toughness, fortitude and devotion to their work. As great a treasure as the text are the thousands of photographs Villiers took of this voyage by dhow. Of these, only a handful were originally published in Sons of Sindbad. The collection, deposited at the National Maritime Museum, has remained largely unpublished until now. The images, selected and introduced by William Facey, Yacoub AI-Hijji and Grace Pundyk, provide an unforgettably vivid memorial of the life and skills of Kuwait�s dhow sailors, of the ports along the route, of Kuwait itself, and of the pearl divers of the Arabian Gulf. The conventional story of the West�s discovery of Arabia and its peoples has been dominated by a celebrity cast of overland explorers, from Niebuhr, Burckhardt, Burton, Palgrave and Doughty in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to T. E. Lawrence, Harry St John Philby and Wilfred Thesiger in the twentieth. Villiers should now be given similar recognition for his exploration of a maritime world now lost to us. / CONTENTS Introduction Map: the Western Indian Ocean 1 From Aden to the Red Sea From Aden to the Hadhramaut Ports 3 To the Swahili Coast 4 Mombasa and Zanzibar To the Rufiji for Mangrove Poles 6 From the Rufiji to South Arabia Mutrah, Port of Muscat and Oman 8 To the Gulf, Bahrain and Home 9 Kuwait, Port of Booms 10 On the Northern Gulf Pearl Banks Epilogue Alan Villiers: A Seafaring Bibliography Index. ISBN 9780954479251