Oman Recalls Its Trade Empire With Hand-Built Boats

Transcript

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As the U.S. and its partners negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, there is one country that's playing a crucial back channel-route - Oman. Its heritage as a go-between stretches back centuries when the country ran a vast maritime network. NPR's Peter Kenyon was in Oman recently and reports on a group that's trying to preserve that legacy with boats.

PETER KENYON, BYLINE: Oman Maritime devotes itself to re-creating some of the traditional wooden boats that marked Oman's seafaring past, including when they expelled Portuguese colonizers and chased them down the East Africa coast, eventually claiming Zanzibar, more than 1,800 miles away, as the Omani capital.

A medieval stone anchor lies on its side in the Oman Maritime boatyard. Omani master shipwright Babu Sankaran chisels away at a bowsprit, and a pungent, fishy scent rises up as another Omani worker applies shark liver oil - the traditional finish of choice to a fishing boat. The yard is sprinkled with vessels not unlike those that once plied the Maritime Silk Route to Asia, dealing in exotic goods and African slaves. Oman invited an American expert on Indian Ocean maritime history, Eric Staples, to be part of its heritage effort. He says the ocean is crucial to understanding Oman, with its thoroughly mix culture built by waves of migrants from Persia, East Africa, India and Arab states.

ERIC STAPLES: A very rich history, where you have this vast series of movements and migrations and transfer of goods, that's perhaps not in the histories because it's not part of the imperial histories, but it's still very present.

KENYON: A shipwright patiently hand sands part of a fishing boat as Staples points to an example of the intricate rope work that goes into traditional wooden boat construction - planks not nailed but stitched together. The preferred rope was made of coconut palm fiber, elastic enough to survive a sea voyage and prone to swell up when wet, so a wad of fibers underneath the stitching fills in gaps and improves the seal. Staples gives a visitor a fast lesson in slow boatbuilding.

STAPLES: You have one guy on one side, takes the rope, pulls it through, pulls on it really hard. And then the other guy on the other side bangs on it with a hammer until it's nice and tight, and he says OK, that's good. And then this guy grabs it, feeds it through the hole again, and then he pulls on it, and they switch. And so that's for each individual stitch. And what you can see here - each hole you have to do this four times. So if you think of 37,000 holes, it's a fair amount of labor. You get the idea.

KENYON: Handmade nails and other innovations further expanded the maritime trade. Oman Maritime's most famous project is the Jewel of Muscat, a replica of a ninth century wreck discovered off Indonesia. In 2010, Oman Maritime took the boat on a six-month voyage from Muscat to Singapore, which had bought the ancient Chinese ceramics found onboard the wreck. Today, the West tends to see Oman as a rare neutral Gulf State able to work with both the Iranians and the Saudis. That ability to stay above regional tensions is sometimes attributed to one man - Oman's ailing sultan, Qaboos bin Said. But Staples says it's an approach that grew naturally out of Oman's oceangoing past.

STAPLES: In many ways the cornerstone of Omani diplomacy today is founded upon that in the sense that, you know, trade requires a fair amount of negotiation. Relationships it has with the rest of the world just didn't appear out of nothing. They have had long-standing relationships with all the political actors in this part of the world.

KENYON: Having revived traditional boat building skills that had nearly died out here, one of Oman Maritime's most important projects may be its effort to train young Omanis to build these boats and take to the sea as their ancestors did. Peter Kenyon, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.