The dhangi, shown above, is a double-ended, deep-sea dhow of the kind that trade in the Gulf of Kutch off northwest India and Pakistan , although this vessel was built for a Saudi sheik. Above right, the lithe bows of the traditional Hong Kong dragon boats . The success of the dragon boat races held last summer in Vancouver has led to the suggestion that the tradition be established there.
A 20ft-long moro-vinta, used for fishing .from the southern Philippines island of Mindanao. \
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of China, where I discovered just how little I knew about dragon boats . While sharing tea with Wu Binghuang, President of the Jami Navigation Institute of Amoy (Xiamen), I mentioned the slender, canoe-shaped vessels being provided by the people of Hong Kong. But Mr. Wu 's canoes were not the streamlined , concave-bottomed boats of Hong Kong . They were stylized serpents, with heavy hulls adorned with decorative scales, elaborate figureheads and tails. At first , I attributed Mr. Wu' s description to national rivalry ; but it proved to be more than that. He showed me photographs of the races held in front of the lnstitute's sixteenth-century building . These boats, he said , were the traditional canoes. And the painful crouch of the paddlers proved this was not a heritage taken lightly. Although the Institute did not send any dragon boats, it was overseeing the construction of a split-bow fu-junk . Approximatel y l 9m long , it had three masts setting woven reed sails in the traditional manner. The hull and deck were constructed of fine China fir , caulked with a mixture of tung oil and chopped hemp or old fi shnets made according to a 2500-yearold formula. Junks have ex isted in some form for almost 5000 years, and the method of construction has not changed substantially in the last millenium . One thinks of junks as being mainly coastwise or riverine vessels , and indeed, today , they are usually of modest proportions. However, in the Sung (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties , Chinese merchant and naval ships regularly traded throughout the Indian Ocean as far west as the Arabian penninsula. The fourteenth-century North African geographer Ibn Battuta describes a junk in Malabar as carrying 1,000 men : 600 sailors and 400 soldiers. However inflated these fi gures might be-and Ibn Battuta had been in China-his impression is an indelible one and strikes us with awe even today , six centuries later . My last stop in the East was Japan , where the primary interest in Expo seemed to center on the display of the prototype for a one-passenger car. I soon realized that their apparent lack of interest in the Marine Plaza---0dd for a country with one of the largest merchant fleets in the world-was merely out of politeness and minding their own business. After informing them of our plans, they offered to lend us a l 30ft-long Japanese junk2 known as a sengokubune. The sengokubune were cargo ships used for domestic trade during the Edo period ( 1600-1868). The word sengokubune consists of three elements: sen, meaning one thousand; goku, a cargo measurement equal to ten cubic feet; and bune, which means ship . The sengokubune which came to Expo was a single-masted , flush-decked ship of recent construction and nothing less than a national treasure, and its presence at Expo was as welcome as it had been unexpected .
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By the end of 1985 , we could see the collection for the Marine Pl aza coming together in good order. Although I had less direct involvement in the ir acquisition , a list of some of the other vessels acquired demonstrates the extent of our efforts to assemble a truly international collection of watercraft. 2. English-speaking Japanese refer to these generically as " junks."
SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1987
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