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Alan Villiers & the Sons of Sindbad
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An Australian in 1930s Kuwait
In the late 1930s, Australian-born Alan Villiers travelled to Arabia to document what he believed were the last days of merchant sailing ships. In December last year the museum made its first foray into the Middle East with the installation of an exhibition of Villiers’ photographs from his travels with Arab sailors. By Lindsey Shaw, an Honorary Research Associate of the museum.
01 Alan Villiers with friends in Kuwait, 1939. The two-year-old in the centre of the photograph is now His Excellency Mr Abdlatif Yousef Al-Hamad, Director General of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development. He and his family kindly invited Kit Villiers, the Australian Ambassador Jonathan Gilbert and author Lindsey Shaw to lunch at his home after a private tour of the Arab Bank building and its treasures of Islamic art. Collection: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 02 The Triumph of Righteousness lightly ballasted and high out of the water runs before a favourable breeze with mainsail and mizzen hoisted. Collection: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
ALAN VILLIERS & THE SONS OF SINDBAD was presented by the Australian National Maritime Museum in conjunction with the Dar Al-Athar Al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait’s National Council for Art, Culture and Letters, and the Australian Embassy (Kuwait). The exhibition coincided with Kuwait’s Annual Cultural Season and also its National Day, marking the day when Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem Al-Sabah ascended to the throne in 1950. Supported by the Council for Australian Arab Relations, we produced the exhibition in association with the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Fifty of Alan Villiers’ photographs (printed from the original negatives) were shown at the Amricani Cultural Centre and the National Assembly in Kuwait City from December 2019 to March 2020. They are silent points in time revealing the great skills and the hard life of the sailors, and old Kuwait City before the discovery of oil changed the face of the city and country forever. Melbourne-born Alan Villiers (1903–1982) was a noted maritime adventurer, journalist, novelist, sailor and photographer who devoted most of his life to the sea and the ships that harnessed the power of the winds. His passion for timber sailing ships took him to sea on the last of the square-riggers; he circumnavigated the world in his own three-masted tall ship, Joseph Conrad, in 1934–36.
In the late 1930s Villiers began a survey to photograph, film and write about the Arabian sailing methods of various types of Arab dhow – baggala, boom, badan, belem, betil, bedeni, ghanjah, jalboot, sambuk and zarook – as they sailed on trading voyages through the Persian and Oman Gulfs, the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea as far south as Tanzania in East Africa. Villiers believed that he was seeing the last days of sail and wanted to record the vessels before they disappeared. He wrote: ‘Only the Arab remained making his voyages as he always had, in a wind-driven vessel sailing without benefit of engines’.1 In November 1938 Alan Villiers, with the help of Ali Abdul Latif Al-Hamad, the Aden representative of the Al-Hamad Kuwaiti merchant house, found passage aboard the Sheikh Mansur as a kind of trial voyage. The zarook voyaged for eight days from Aden, one of the busiest ports in the world, to bustling Jizan (Gizan) on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast. The zarook was a typical small double-ended cargo vessel loaded with Rangoon rice, Javanese sugar and bales of Japanese cottons, bound for remote Arabian bazaars. Life on board was hard for the crew of eight as the open, lateen-rigged sail boat had no shelter and little decking. As it was Ramadan, Villiers respectfully joined the crew in fasting. The Sheikh Mansur was about 15 metres long, with two short masts, and lay low in the water. Voyaging in this small craft revolved around the wind and currents, and Villiers remarked that he lost all sense of time as one day passed seamlessly into the next.
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01 The Kuwaiti shoreline was one of Villiers’ favourite locations as he could observe the dhows being built, maintained and sailed. Today, the dhows have a similar shape but they are diesel powered rather than sailed.
02 The Amricani Cultural Centre, one of the venues for the exhibition. It was originally built in 1912 as the American Mission Hospital for women and men. Images by Lindsey Shaw
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Villiers’ second voyage was aboard a Kuwaiti boom named Bayan, translated by Villiers as Triumph of Righteousness. Fashioned by master builders, stately booms like Triumph were the typical cargo vessels of Kuwaiti seafarers. From December 1938 to June 1939, Villiers sailed the monsoon winds from Aden to the Swahili coast and then home to Kuwait. He described the Triumph of Righteousness as ‘massive, without being heavy; strong, with no hint of sluggishness; stout, though sweetly lined’. At more than 20 metres in length it was ‘an upstanding, handsome thoroughbred of a ship’. On the voyage south the boom carried a full cargo of salt, rice, sugar, canned milk and other staples, as well as passengers. The north-east monsoon winds carried the Triumph to Mombasa and Zanzibar, where the cargo was sold and the passengers disembarked. The boom was given a routine overhaul on Kwale Island off British Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania), before coasting south to the Rufiji Delta. There it collected a full cargo of mangrove poles to sell and sailed the south-west monsoon home to the Persian Gulf. Kuwait was the last port of call for Villiers’ six-month voyage on the Triumph of Righteousness. It was an important port on the dhow routes linking Arabia, Persia, India and East Africa. Every aspect of the social and economic life of Kuwait interested Alan Villiers. There he lived the life of a well-to-do Arab, meeting Kuwait’s ruler, Sheikh Ahmad bin Jabir Al-Sabah, and made a fascinating study of the city. ‘Ships, ships, ships, all along the sea. Sailors, quartermasters, carpenters, nakhodas, all along the shore road – what a place Kuwait was.’ Nakhodas were the masters of the dhows. Villiers’ photographs, films and diaries capture life on the waterfront, the captains and sailors enjoying their break before the sailing season began again in October, while labourers and apprentices were repairing and building ships. Merchants and captains concluded business deals and socialised in cafes. Alan Villiers devoted his life to ships of sail, and his decision to record Arab dhows before they disappeared has left us with a striking photographic record of the men and the vessels as well as life on the waterfront. He donated his photographic and film archive to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, before his death in 1982, and his diaries are held by the National Library of Australia. Villiers was one of the leading Western writers on the Arabian world and he is, perhaps, more widely known in Kuwait than he is in Australia.
The Australian Embassy (Kuwait) organised the opening night and invited two special guests – Christopher (Kit) Villiers, Alan’s son, and Dr Grace Pundyck, who was instrumental in bringing the collection to light when she was researching at Greenwich. Both spoke eloquently at the opening, as did our own Director Kevin Sumption PSM. The opening of the exhibition also brought together many relatives of those who had sailed with Villiers – children, grandchildren and cousins who were proud to see photographs of their relatives on show. The success and general interest generated by this exhibition in Kuwait has led to discussions with the Australian Embassy in Riyadh and it is planned to travel a modified version through Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman late in 2021.
1 All Villiers’ quotes in this article are from his book Sons of Sindbad (Sribner, New York, 1940).
