His wind is free

Alan Villiers captured the strength, energy and movement on board the Triumph of Righteousness in his photographs. ‘Alan Villiers & the Sons of Sindbad: An Australian in 1930s Kuwait’ – a photo and film exhibition that celebrates the famous voyage by Villiers in 1938 – is being held in collaboration with Dar Al Athar Al Islamiyyah, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Council for Australian-Arab Relations and the Australian Embassy, Kuwait. The exhibition will run at the Amricani Cultural Centre until February, after which it will shift to the National Assembly.

‘B ut one cannot just go to Arabia and expect to find out about Arab sailing commerce, or anything else. It was of not the slightest use to go in steamships, to sit in ports however interesting and talk with Europeans or a few selected Asians whose English perhaps was better than their seafaring knowledge. No, I had to sail in Arab ships and stay with them, for years if necessary – learn the seaman’s language, gain their confidence.”

So wrote Alan Villiers, the Australian mariner, adventurer, photographer and maritime historian in his riveting book ‘Sons of Sindbad’. And Villiers did just that. He sailed with the natives on an Arab dhow up and down the Arabian and African coast for several months. In the process, he documented the dying moments of an old way of life and etched his name alongside more celebrated adventurers, travel writers and chroniclers like Charles Doughty, T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark. Although Alan Villiers is a name that is not usually bandied about as the rest, his contribution to the understanding of Arab seafaring is indisputably singular. He did what no Anglo-Arab writer did before him. He wrote of the Arabs as seafarers and chose to travel down the timeless East African coast and back to the Gulf aided by the monsoon winds.

“I tried to find out how much was known of Semitic seafaring, what records already existed. At the time, there were almost none. I was informed there was nothing in Arabic and nothing later than a few references in the Old Testament in Hebrew either. The Semitic mariners had been a close-lipped lot, for good reasons: they kept the trade secrets they had painfully learned to themselves ... As far as I could discover, the most recent European chronicler of some shipping in Asian

waters was Marco Polo, who took passage in several large ships there. Whatever else, he may have been, Signor Polo was no sailor. The handful of great European travellers in Arabia — Doughty, Lawrence, Stark, Niebuhr, Bertram Thomas, Bell – kept inland, which was fascinating enough … They had little real opportunity for studying such seafaring even if they wished.” (Preface – Sons of Sindbad). In an article for the Saudi Aramco magazine, William Facey, museum consultant and writer referred to Villiers as the ‘Thesiger of the Arabian Sea’. “Like his contemporary Wilfred Thesiger, who won fame for twice crossing Arabia’s great sand sea, the Rub’ al-Khali, in the 1940s, Villiers was not only a writer finely attuned to his environment but also a gifted photographer,” wrote Facey. “Indeed, these and other similarities between the two men entitle Villiers, who is much less known than his English counterpart, to be regarded as the Thesiger of the Arabian Sea.”

“What I liked about ‘Sons of Sindbad’ is that it is a Kuwaiti story, and not an Australian one,” explained Jonathan Gilbert, Australian Ambassador to the State of Kuwait. The ambassador is the initiator and organiser of ‘Alan Villiers & the Sons of Sindbad: An Australian in 1930s Kuwait’, a photo and film exhibition that celebrates the famous voyage by Villiers in 1938. Held in collaboration with Dar Al Athar Al Islamiyyah, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Council for Australian – Arab Relations and the Australian Embassy, Kuwait, the exhibition will run at the Amricani Cultural Centre until February, after which it will shift to the National Assembly. “Sons of Sindbad is a story about Kuwait’s past and traditions, and it is done in a very unassuming way,” said the Ambassador. We were at the Amricani going over the exhibition in close detail. “Villiers did not have any agenda when he decided to sail with the Arabs. He loved to sail, and he was worried about the fact that steam age and oil were transforming shipping and the only place left with big merchant ships was the Arabian Gulf. And so he sailed out of Africa, lived on the boat with the locals, and became enmeshed in their world without any clear purpose beyond the fact that he loved sailing, ” said the Ambassador. Today, ‘Sons of Sindbad’ is one of the few records we have from the ‘inside’, and it is a first of its kind – a Westerner living onboard an Arab ship in challenging conditions, suffering the extreme climate while not speaking Arabic. Despite the hardships, the photojournalist and mariner described what he saw in great detail and with genuine delight. Grace Pundyk, William Facey and Yaqoub Al Hajji in their introduction to ‘Sons of Sindbad: The Photographs’ write, “Sons of Sindbad may be a rattling good sea dog’s yarn, but it is very much more. The wide scope of Villiers’ interests lifts it out of the niche of sailing memoirs and places it squarely within the larger genres of travel writing and ethnographic study. His ambivalent position, as a Westerner connected with the imperial reach of British officials on the one hand, but, on the other, accepted as part of an Arab dhow crew, afforded him a unique vantage point. His awareness that he was witnessing the demise of an ancient tradition of windborne trade in the face of irreversible mechanization lends piquancy. But he does not lull us into romantic illusions about the life of the Gulf sailors and pearlers, exploited as they were by the traditional debt system and mostly living from hand to mouth.”

Despite his rich legacy, available to us in the form of books, images and films, Alan Villiers is a name not many people are familiar with even in his native Australia. The reason, the Ambassador said was perhaps the sudden outbreak of the Second World War. “Villiers’ story is as impressive as that of Freya Stark or Thesiger, but it is sadly low key because of the outbreak of war. His book on the voyage published in 1940, got lost in the World War 2 stories, ” said the ambassador. When asked about how ‘Australian in spirit’ was Villiers’ enterprise, Ambassador Gilbert responded, “He was Australian in the unassuming way he approached everything. Villiers had no intention of dictating to the locals; he was interested in learning from them. His ability to blend in, listen and not preach, his sense of adventure – all that to me is Australian,” he said. People to people connection helps build bridges between cultures, and even though diplomatic relations between Kuwait and Australia formalized fairly recently, it was Villiers who lay the foundation for the close ties that evolved. “Villiers was genuinely interested in the traditional history and culture of this region, and he meticulously documented it. He sailed with the locals in very basic conditions; he suffered with them and in the process forged a deep connection that has endured,” said Ambassador Gilbert. Today, the relationship between the two nations has grown to embrace education, food security, trade and investments, firming the partnership between Australia and Kuwait.

Villiers love for sailing began early. Born in Melbourne in 1903, he joined as an apprentice on a barque in the Tasman Sea when he was fifteen. What followed was a life full of adventure and learning, resulting in a treasure hoard of extraordinary photographs, books and films that have documented for posterity ancient ways of life that have disappeared. One of his adventures included working as a reporter on the first modern whaling expedition to Antarctica resulting in the famous book ‘Whaling in the Frozen South’. By 1939, Villiers had already sailed in most kinds of sail-powered ships still at sea. “He is perhaps the most maritime person I have known, ”said Ambassador Gilbert, who visited Villiers extensive book collection at the University of Melbourne. “Villiers was a prolific writer and collector of books. He left a large collection of wonderful books on sailing to the University. Some of them are on the most obscure subjects you can imagine, including things like different sailing cloths of Africa,” he smiled.

The opening night of the exhibition of ‘Alan Villiers and the Sons of Sindbad’ saw the presence of many individuals who have a personal connection with the voyage. Descendants and extended families of the crew of the ‘The Triumph of Righteousness’ were present as was Christopher ‘Kit’Villiers, the mariner’s son. “This is another part of the ‘Sons of Sindbad’ story I love,” said Ambassador Jonathan Gilbert. “Grandchildren and family members of the crew on the boat turned up for the opening. Some of them came up to me and said, ‘Our grandfather is in these photographs, and we have come to pay our tribute to him.’ This shows that the story is still alive in Kuwait.” Abdullatif Al Hamad, Director General of the Arab Fund who was at the opening managed to locate himself in one of the images taken by Villiers. The dhow on which Villiers sailed belonged to the Al Hamad family, a leading shipping family of those times. Interestingly, while sourcing out Villiers’ papers from the National Library of Australia, Ambassador Gilbert came across a couple of interesting documents including a detailed record of Kuwaiti dhows, their registration numbers, ownership details, sail route and goods carried, along with a receipt for gifts and toys that Villiers shipped to his Kuwaiti friends and their families, long after he left these shores.

The exhibition celebrates Kuwait’s past as a trading and seafaring nation and pays a fitting tribute to the courage, resilience and storytelling abilities of one of the most overlooked maritime chroniclers of the 20th century.Through his compelling black and white images, drawings and writings, Villiers tell us what he saw and how it happened with honesty and clarity. Alan Villers travelled to Arabia in the thirties to record what he believed were the last days of merchant sailing. The exhibition includes images from a voyage on Sheikh Mansur “the grimmest vessel” which took Villiers from Aden to Jizan. Villiers then joined Captain Nejdi and his crew on The Triumph of Righteousness in which he sailed for nine months along the East African coast and back to Kuwait. His photographs of the voyage and his stay in Kuwait reflect his fascination with every aspect of life both on the ship and land. From the local architecture made of sundried mud and coral stones to life on the waterfront, Villiers meticulously documented everything. From the great shipyards and the captains and sailors enjoying their break before the next sailing season, to the labourers and apprentices hard at work, and women and merchants doing business in the souq – the images tell a story of a life fast fading away from the collective memory of the region.

The response to ‘Sons of Sindbad’ has been impressive. “I was surprised by the reaction,” admitted Ambassador Gilbert. “Kuwait’s connection with the story is much stronger and deeper than I thought. Part of my motivation was to tell the story, but in the end, it was more of a celebration than a discovery.” Villers began his voyage of discovery wondering how it would be to sail with the fabled Arab navigators as they harnessed the wind with skills and knowledge passed down through centuries. During this journey, and his later visits to Kuwait, he discovered a community that was at the cusp of change. With the discovery of oil, and the accompanying ‘progress’ Kuwait was turning its back on its maritime past and barrelling its way towards a modern chromatic future. Villiers knew that change was inevitable and desired, yet, one can hear the wistfulness in his voice as he shared his exchange with his former adversary turned friend, Captain Najdi during a visit to Kuwait in the late sixties in the Preface of the 1969 edition of the ‘Sons of Sindbad’. “‘Allah is great,’ I said. ‘His winds are free’. “‘Allah is great,’ Najdi replied … ‘And sometimes I wish that I could use His winds again. For it was a good life that my sons can never know—no Kuwait sons shall know. We cannot bring those ways back again.’”