"ملف ٤/١ معلومات عامة بخصوص الكويت والمنطقة الداخلية" [و‎‎١‎٦‎٢] (٤٧٤/٣٢٣)

Booms Report Page 2
would be about 14000 Rupees, and this v&xfr is about
what she cost. A new boom launched yesterday, with a
capacity of 2000 packages, cost 10000 Rupees: that is
for the hull alone. 7ith her masts and sails, and longboat
and a couple of old bower anchors and so forth, she will
cost about 12000 rupees. A big boom such as the Samhan
(nakhoda Abdul V/ahhab bin Isa al-Oitami; now an exile
in Basra, while his brother Yusuf commands the boom),
which can stow about 5000 packages of dates, cost --
as far as I can discover -- some 40,000 rupees. Booms
are always built of teak and other woods brought up from
Malabar. Usually merchants who own booms bring their own
timber, store it in their own yards, and hire shipwright-
carpenters by the day when they wish to build. The
outsider would always find building more expensive.
Booms are usually owned by the bigger merchants,
and even though many of them are registered in the names
of their nakhodas or the families of their nakhodas,
it is invariably the merchants who are the real owners --
at any rate, they put up the money. It often suits them
to allow the nakhodas to act as owners, for in this way
they get better work from the nakhodas, and more profit
-Kr
from the booms.^'Tgiere a nakhoda is the alleged owner/
of a boom, there invariably exists a structure of debt
and subterfuge almost impossible to see through: the
nakhodas do not seem to mind. Take, for instance, the
case of the family of Ali bin Nassir Uejdi. This family,
a Uejd family without much sibstance, holds now two
large booms in the African trade. The larger, the
boom Bayan , cost some 14000 rupees new. The smaller,
which is commanded by Abdulla the brother of Ali, cost
10000 rupees, bought this year at the age of perhaps
six or seven years. Practically the whole of this 24,000
rupees was put up by the firm of Khalid Abdul-latif al-
Hamad and Bros., date and general merchants, plantation
owners, financiers, and whatbots in Kuweit, Basra, Aden,