Page 189 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
Sumerian times, this was the one leg that really demanded naviga­
tion.
The gulf, when seen in correct proportions on a globe and not
distorted on a flat world map, is the size of England and Scotland
combined, and shaped like a stomach, with a single entrance and a
single exit. We had entered by the throat, coming down the
Shatt-al-Arab at one end, and were now heading for the tube-like
exit, the Hormuz Strait at the other. Just there the Arabian peninsula
stretches out a long dagger that points from south to north, which
would have struck the bulging belly of Asia across the straits but for
the coast of Iran, which withdraws in a deep inflexion before the
dagger’s tip, thus creating the extremely curved and tricky passage
between the land-locked gulf and the free ocean outside.
There was more to it, as we rushed merrily ahead over the waves,
than defying the main wind direction and getting out through a
narrow neck, flanked by rocks and dotted with islands. The Hor­
muz Strait is renowned for its incredibly dense shipping traffic,
with tankers and merchant vessels from all over the world rushing
through in both directions, making it an extremely hazardous
playground for small sailing vessels. Rightly or wrongly, we had
been warned that this narrow passage represented the busiest
i shipping lane in the world, and our pilot chart showed it as a marine
autostrada with one lane reserved for incoming and the other for
outgoing traffic. All seemed well organised for superships chasing
through at full speed with radar and automatic steering, but appar­
ently the security for smaller vessels of wood or reeds was not up to
the same standard. The captain of a Norwegian supertanker told me
that, patrolling the ship one early morning, upon entering this
strait, his watchman had discovered a dhow-sail hanging from the
bow. Nobody had seen the dhow itself, nor did they ever hear a
thing about its crew.
With Khalifa as interpreter, Norman and I had repeatedly visited
the dock for small ships at Manama, speaking to the owners of the
many motor-dhows. There were some small boats coming from
Oman to fetch bottled water and other cargo from Bahrain, and one
of the dhow captains said there was a narrow passage, sheltered
from the Hormuz Strait shipping lane by some rocks, where they
used to pass to avoid the busy thoroughfare of the fast big ships. He
agreed to pilot us through if we followed in his wake. There was no
need to be reckless when there was every reason for precaution, and
as we set sail outside the tanker anchorage of Bahrain, an old and
rather weather-beaten dhow without mast was running in our
164