Ngalawa or Ungalawa is a traditional Swahili double outrigger sailboat trimaran widely used by locals in the Zanzibar archipelago and mainland Tanzania and Kenya as a coastal fishing boat. also for the transport of goods or people over short distances.
The body of the ngalava is a canoe-dolbanka, made of a single barrel about 5-6 m long, about 0.5 m wide and about 0.7 m high, cut from the edges and hollowed out from the inside [5]. To increase stability, remote outriggers (balancers) are attached to the canoe body on each side. The double outrigger consists of two 3-4 meter wooden beams fixed perpendicular to the body (the front is attached to the mast and the rear to the stern), to which flat float boards (similar in shape to skis) are attached at an angle to two additional beams. fixed in the "rib" position. The total width of both outriggers from float to float is 5-6 meters.
The only mast is located in the central part of the canoe hull, often slightly inclined to the bow and carries a single scythe, usually a quadrangular Arabian sail with a very short forehead or a similar triangular Latin sail, with a total area of 30-40 m2. An attached rudder with a tiller is used to control the boat, which is quite rare for such types of vessels as canoes . Usually the ngalavu team consists of two people - one steers the boat and the other balances the trimaran, moving between the outriggers .
Due to its lightness and shallow draft, the Ngalava is a very fast vessel and can reach speeds of 5-10 knots under sail.
The Swahili of the East African coast is one of the few non-Austronesian peoples to use boats with balancers (outriggers).
Canoes with outriggers are the heritage of the Austronesian peoples of the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia and were used by them for long sea voyages. It is believed that the use of outriggers may have been due to the need to give the boats stability after the invention of the Austronesian sails type "crab claw" in about 1500 BC [6]. From the islands of Southeast Asia, canoes with outriggers spread along with waves of Austronesian migration to numerous islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Only a few non-Austronesian peoples also use outrigger boats, but they adopted the idea and technology of such boats in contact with Austronesians. Such peoples include the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, where balance boats are known as orova , some groups in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands [8], and the Swahili on the East African coast, who borrowed the idea of trimaran from Malagasy descendants of Austronesian peoples. who colonized the neighboring island of Madagascar at the beginning of our era .
The name and technology of the Ngalava were adapted from Swahili from the name and technology of the Malagasy Trimaran Lacan, typical of the west coast of Madagascar [10], which in turn is an adaptation of the typical Austronesian pro-Canoe balancer introduced to Madagascar by 200 AD. Interestingly, in the XIX-XX centuries, the Malagasy Lacan lost one of the balancers, while the Ngalava remained a classic trimaran.
If the shape of the Ngalava hull was borrowed from Swahili by the Austronesians, the oblique trapezoidal shape of the Arab Ngalava sails comes from the Arab Dau, who along with Arab traders came to the coast of Swahili from the 10th-11th centuries. Due to the similarity of the shape of the triangular sails of the Ngalava with the sails of another traditional Swahili boat of the Mashua type, which belongs to the Dau, the Ngalava is often also called the Dau. This is a mistake, because ngalava refers to a canoe with two balancers (trimaran), and real dau belong to single-hull keel vessels with a hull.
You can see the work of a sailor-balancer. Ngalava on Fr. Zanzibar, Tanzania.
Zanzibar 1913; 2r;3r;4r.SG 291;292;293.
Source:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... Zanzibar._