Model ship,Bengali odi, square rigged
PY Manguin’s comments are based on his fieldwork in the traditional shipyards of the northern atolls of the Maldives and interviews at Male in March 1988 (results partly published in P.-Y. Manguin, "Les techniques de construction navale aux Maldives originaires d’Asie du Sud-Est", Techniques & Culture, 35-36, 2000, p. 21-47). Bell (1922) has Furreda odi, which traded as far as Aden and Aceh and could be as long as 45 ft. It is no longer built. Admiral E. Paris (1841) has a good description and a drawing of an odi under sail. Koechlin (1979) reconstructed in detail, on paper, the odi’s features, with accompanying vocabulary, on the basis of local descriptions. They had a partly European rig type, with two masts. Sails were already made of cotton in Admiral Paris’s time. Koechlin says they were still to be seen in Maldivian waters in the 1950s, but had disappeared in the 1970s. I saw none in the northern atolls during my stay there in 1988, but Block (1992) says they were specific to the southern atolls and could be up to 27m in length.
