one mast, one sail, and one rudder, and have no deck, but only a cover spread over the cargo when loaded. This cover consists of hides, and on the top of these hides they put the horses which they take to India for sale. They have no iron to make nails of, and for this reason they use only wooden trenails in their shipbuilding, and then stitch the planks with twine as I have told you. Hence 'tis a perilous business to go a voyage in one of those ships, and many of them are lost, for in that Sea of India the storms are often terrible."
Gemelli Carreri, who visited this coast in 1693–9, gives a similar description, quoted by Capt. A. W. Stiffe: Former Trading Centers of the Persian Gulf: Geographical Journal, XIII, 294:
"Instead of nails, which they are without, they use pegs of bamboo or cane, and further join the planks with strings made of rushes. For anchor, they have a large stone with a hole, and for oards, a stout stick with a little round plank attached to the end."
"Stitched vessels," Sir B. Frere writes (Yule's Marco Polo, Cordier's Ed., I, 117), "are still used. I have seen them of 200 tons burden, but they are being driven out by iron-fastened vessels, as iron gets cheaper, except where (as on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts) the pliancy of a stitched boat is useful in a surf." But the stitched build in the Gulf is now confined to fishing-boats.
The fish-oil used to rub the ships was whale-oil. The old Arab voyagers of the 9th century describe the fishermen of Siraf in the Gulf as cutting up the whale-blubber and drawing the oil from it, which was mixed with other stuff, and used to rub the joints of ships' planking. (Reinaud, Relation des Voyages, I, 146.)
Friar Odoric (Journal, Chap. II), writing of "Ormes," says "here also they use a kind of barque or ship called Jase, being compact together only with cords. And I went on board into one of them, wherein I could not find any iron at all, and in the space of twenty-eight days I arrived at the city of Thana" (on Salsette Island, a short distance north of Bombay), "wherein four of our friars were martyred for the faith of Christ."
Jase, Cordier observes, is the Arabic Djehaz.
"Sir John Mandeville" gives a legend arising from this method of construction (Voyage and Travel, Chap. LIII, p. 125, Ashton's edition.) "Near that isle (Hormus) there are ships without nails of iron or bonds, on account of the rocks of adamants (loadstones), for they are all-abundant there in that sea that it is marvellous to speak of, and if a ship passed there that had iron bonds or iron nails it would perish, for the adamant, by its nature, draws iron to it, and so it would draw the ship that it should never depart from it."
