Master and Commander

Kannakapillagah Malaikkal Mohammed Moopan points out that he hoped they might reach some undreamt of destination and unleash a train of happy events. ‘‘At the very least, they may have provided comforting contact to some shipwrecked soul,’’ he muses, sitting at his house, with its broad gambrel roof and flaring eaves, which has a lovely courtyard scattered with bonsai date palms, Indian laurels and jacaranda.

Beypore, the village writer Vaikom Mohammed Basheer went to ‘‘so that my dream became my address’’, is an hour’s drive from Kozhikode, and a treat of banyan trees, flame-red bromeliads, wee streets and a grey beach. The one main street, flanked by stucco houses washed in faded tones of pale yellow and watery blue-green, drops abruptly to the waterfront and a busy jetty.

When the Ghalib, one of the biggest dhows ever built, rolled off Beypore’s dry dock and embarked on its maiden journey on March 21, it not only carried Moopan’s particular imprimatur but also the burden of his expectation: That some day beyond its proper and plotted course, it will seek out the unknown and have commiseration as much as commerce as the aim of its voyages.

The Ghalib was formally launched last Monday, though launched is a misnomer because it will take at least two weeks for the dhow to be fully eased into the water. Both Ali Ghalafi, the Dubai-based millionaire Arab owner, and the shipwrights here are insistent to the point of superstition that everything be done the traditional way, including the arcane method of using ropes and pulleys to get the boat—10 feet each day—off dry land. It is the same idiosyncrasy that accounted for the low-key ribbon cutting.

For the last two years, Beypore’s boat makers worked on their biggest assignment to date. The Ghalib has a keel 130 ft long and weighs 1,250 tonnes. Supervisors were chary about discussing the finer details in the order book, apparently Ghalafi demanded nothing but the very best in all respects, and expenses weren’t a hindrance.

With rampant deforestation having depleted Kerala’s own abundant resources of seasoned teak, 3,000 cubic ft of timber was imported from Malaysia. For the mast, spars and other parts of the ship, exotic wood like the iroko, ekki, pine and mahogany were brought in from places as distant and disparate as Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Sweden, and Oregon, USA.

Built to honour the seafaring tradition of the Ghalafi family, the Ghalib has spiffy Flash Gordon fittings that blend in with the dhow’s arcane structure and a special prayer deck. Other accessories like porthole windows, rudder pintos (elevated portion of rudder), gudgeons (a major joint in a boat’s stern), even token cannons of pure brass were cast in the yard’s foundry.

With air travel and super tankers having made most forms of shipping redundant, Beypore should have slid into terminal decline. However, it remains one of the few places in the world where sea-faring ships are still fashioned out of wood.

Orders continue to pour in from the Arab world and to a lesser extent from other parts of Asia and Europe. Instead of cargo vessels, Beypore’s boatbuilding yards now indulge sundry tycoons’ nostalgia for custom-made ketches, luxury yachts, even a floating home. Not to mention the building of replicas for the periodic retracing of the maritime Silk Route by Norwegian or Japanese adventurers and their generous sponsors.

At the sprawling 6,000-square ft boatyard-cum-docking berth erected on land leased by the municipality, one had to shout to be heard above the din created by power hammers and electric saws.

‘‘To bend 11 cm-thick planks into the shape of the hull and caulk the seams is a time consuming and very difficult task,’’ explains Gokuldas, Ghalafi’s point man here, who takes us on a conducted tour of the yard.

There were no signs of any blueprints or drawings, let alone computer-aided design. A few special gauges helped with the precision aspects of the work but ultimately, the shipwrights seemed to rely on intrinsic hand-eye coordination. In determining the convexity of a felloe, without the aid of any device, it appeared that Moopan’s brain had tailored itself to this task by growing into it, just as his back had evolved the suppleness required in the sawpit.

After the main hull was built using durable woods like timber, the bulkheads and thwarts were added with marine plywood. Cut-to-shape plywood panels were literally stitched together—each panel has holes drilled in at its edges—with galvanised soft iron wire.

Plywood, it seems, was a red rag to the purist in Moopan. Though the workers couldn’t see any defect with the seams, Moopan was not satisfied. He asked them to redo the stitching at select points and apply a strong composite of epoxy resin and fibreglass tape to the outer edges. As Moopan turned away, Gokuldas shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘‘You need to change with the times. And plywood is not as bad as he thinks. It’s got high strength-to-weight ratio.’’

Outside the boatyards, strangely and sadly, there is no waterfront memorabilia, nothing—apart from a few shops peddling old iron anchors and miniature boats as souvenirs—to indicate Beypore’s venerable heritage. A fact commented upon, according to long-time Beypore resident and hardware shop owner Martin Libero, by none other than the legendary explorer, traveller and author Tim Severin when he stopped over in 1991 enroute to China from Muscat, in a reed-boat imitation of Sindbad’s epic journey.

‘‘The cry would go out ‘the Omani has come, the Omani has come’ and we would leave everything behind and run to the beach. For weeks thereafter, the nakudah (ship’s skipper) and his men would roam the streets, eat at our homes and we children would accompany them as they haggled over the purchase of cordage, hawsers and various items of ship chandlery for their return journey,” said Libero, recalling a not-too-distant past and Beypore’s pivotal place in the age-old East-West trade.

Each year after the monsoon winds had abated, dhows from West Asia sailed across the Indian Ocean to barter dates, frankincense and dried fish in exchange for rice, lentils, timber and, of course, cardamom and pepper. There was more than trade involved in these visits. It was a matter of social status for a Malabar Moplah family to receive an offer of marriage from a man who had sailed across the seas, no matter that he may have a wife back home. Most of these Malayali wives never got to see Oman, but were content to wait for their spouses’ annual visit.

Towards evening, taking a break, Moopan and Gokuldas walked out on to the long stone pier jutting out to sea. In the crepuscular light, as the muezzin’s call announced the maghreb or evening prayer, Moopan knelt on the stone while Gokuldas stood behind, arms folded and head bowed in unassuming penitence.

Prayer over, they walked out to the water’s edge and stood silently gazing out into the distance. Each taking their shared heritage and the ground beneath their feet for granted—a culture and land that the Arabs first glorified by referring to it as khairallah or “land blessed by God”.