A Shipwreck Seen

We’re often subjected to views of Dubai from above: not just via aerial imagery but also, as plugged by a recent marketing campaign, on ziplines, skydives, and “Dinner in the Sky” where one nibbles while strapped into a rollercoaster seat.

Fifty-three years ago last night, some travelers to Dubai viewed the city as most arrivals once did: just ahead, on the horizon. It was late, nearing 11 p.m. on April 5, 1968. In crescent form, the moon that night made for little competition with the electricity that coursed through Dubai’s houses and illuminated the low-slung shores. During their journeys, the passengers, mostly Pakistanis, had witnessed more arduous lightshows against night skies, but they must have been relieved to see Dubai’s glimmering lights. Contemporary reporting described how “expectant eyes gazed at the port area studded with lights.” Safety grew near.

The ship was built for cargo. On that night, it was devastatingly overcrowded with people. During embarking in Khobar, on Saudi Arabia’s eastern shore, travelers were pressed into each other, soon realizing there would be no room to stretch a back or play with a child for the rest of the day. Once everyone was aboard, the captain ordered bags of cement to be loaded, a quick profit in Dubai he could not resist. The loading only stopped once the boatmen refused more.

The passengers were hajj pilgrims who had made their way across Saudi Arabia from Hijaz to Khobar. For many pilgrims, the hajj took years to complete, often stretched out with months of toil to pay for it. None of these travelers was officially registered to attend that year’s hajj. Only about a hundred of them carried a passport. After the stop in Dubai, they were reportedly completing the trip with a return to Karachi, many heading back to towns and villages of Sindh. Some though might have resolved to stay on in Dubai. Rumors abounded of new, gigantic projects just getting started there—work opportunities.

A luminous dome of light guided the overburdened ship, its waterline dangerously submerged. With their gaze pressed forward, passengers on upper deck could measure how the distance to shore was shrinking. They were hungry, dehydrated, and for a moment relieved. No one knows exactly how many died; survivors’ estimates were higher than official ones.

Before I explain how this story falls apart, I have to remind you of the state of Dubai Harbor. In the mid-1950s, British engineers had conjured up a cheap harbor scheme, whereby the inland Dubai Creek was re-sculpted so that it would dredge itself. Before then, Dubai Creek was a bumpy, swampy waterway whose sandbars menaced merchants’ boats. By narrowing the creek’s passage and reinforcing its edges with concrete and steel, engineers accelerated the tidal water’s movement, making the current powerful enough to flush out unwanted sediment. What the system did not calculate was where exactly the spewed-forth sand settled after its discharge to the already shallow sea.

With Dubai tantalizingly in view, the boat came to a violent, abortive stop. The ship’s weighed hull grounded on a sandbar. The craft split in two. Those passengers above could survive by jumping into water and grabbing onto flotsam. Those inside the hull probably had no chance, being trapped amidst the disturbed sandbar, the suffocating salt water, and deadweight bags of cement.

Commercial boats made rescue efforts in the early hours of April 6. By sunrise, survivors were being collected on a designated patch of shore, while corpses took their time drifting in. There was a report of a woman who died just before reaching shore, her young child in her arms still alive, but only briefly. Tragedies like these happened more often than they were recorded. Well into the 1970s countless ships carried unregistered people and goods from Iran, South Asia, and other Arab Gulf ports to Dubai, with the weary travelers often forced to alight on stranded shores hours away from the city. What made this catastrophe different was that the clandestine boat came so close to Dubai’s port. This nightmare unfolded in the city’s daylight.

Noor Ali Rashid helped make this tragedy visible. He had come to Dubai in 1958 from Gwadar, in today’s Pakistan. By the early days of April 1968, Rashid was a well-known photojournalist. He captured the aftermath: the makeshift camp on the Gulf shore; the hasty funeral arranged for the found bodies; and the ongoing search for more lives, more bodies. He sent his reports to Karachi. In 2014, Sharjah Art Museum held a retrospective of the photographer’s work. The exhibition presented some of the reporting on this tragedy, including correspondence with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. With Rashid’s help, Dawn reported on the story for multiple days. Pakistan’s president Ayub Khan publicly expressed concern about what had occurred. Political attention, persistent reporting, and an undeniable presence of victims made this tragedy seen; Dawn ran an editorial demanding reforms and punishment for racketeers.

In the following days, Pakistani storeowners in Dubai closed their shops to pay their respects and joined the larger community in delivering provisions to the survivors. On April 7, while its officials worked at the rescue site, Dubai’s government denied to the Associated Press of Pakistan that any such tragedy had occurred, later suggesting that it was just a smuggler’s load, not a ship of families.

Further down the shoreline from where survivors were being kept, preparations were under way behind a secured fence. There, two days after the official denial, a ceremony was to take place, where Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, “drove the first pile” into the ground. It was the start of building the vast Port Rashid. During the celebrations for Dubai’s engineered future, the shipwreck’s survivors waited for someone to determine their  future. They waited atop donated grass mats, quarantined in the open air.

Walls and fences separated the two events, one meant to be celebrated and the other to be forgotten. Dubai’s government announced a donation of 100,000 rupees to the cause. On April 18, the Pakistani government chartered a flight to bring 167 survivors home. Such swift, comfortable treatment was likely a result of heightened press coverage of the deadly incident. It’s unknown whether any survivors chose to remain.

As a single flight brought survivors home, a steady stream of ships ushered more Pakistanis toward Dubai’s lit-up skyline, now flush with all-night flood lamps at Port Rashid. As Dubai’s lights pulsated before them, the new arrivals from sea joined the labor force that knocked down the survivors’ temporary camp, dug up the sunken shore, and replaced it with piers of reinforced concrete. Sandbars were no longer to make new victims in the shallows of Gulf waters. Port Rashid, it was announced, would replace them with scheduled certainty, brisk arrivals.

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This is the ninth dispatch around the publication of Showpiece City. You can read the first eight: Telephones & Dynamite, A Season of Migrations, West, A Circumscribed World, Gathering at a Roundabout, John Harris Comes to Dubai, and Wild Machines over Dubai, Have Some Fun, and Thrown to Stand.