Sons of Sindbad.: An Account of Sailing with the Arabs in their Dhows, in the Red Sea, round the Coasts of Arabia, and to Zanzibar and Tanganyika; Pearling in the Persian Gulf; and the Life of the Shipmasters and the Mariners of Kuwait.

London: Hodder & Stoughton Limited,, 1940. First edition, first impression, retaining the scarce jacket in lovely condition, of probably the most desirable of the author's numerous publications and much enhanced by his superb photographs. The Australian master mariner Villiers was described in the American jacket blurb as "the best-known and the last of the great deep-water sailing shipmen". Alan Villiers (1903-1982), "a sea captain in the true sense of the word and an outstanding personality", embarked on his nautical career at the age of 15. "There followed many projects requiring his formidable skills of seamanship, command and organisation: sailing with the Parma in the 1932 and 1933 grain races; as proprietor of the sail-training vessel, Joseph Conrad, in 1934-36; training as a pilot, 1937-38; sailing with Arab dhows in the Persian Gulf, 1938-39; and captaining a replica of the Mayflower in its Atlantic crossing in 1957" (ADB). In 1936, following his circumnavigation of the globe in the Joseph Conrad, Villiers sold her and began to look for another type of seafaring "which retained the true traditions of the sea" (jacket). He found this among the company of the 115-ton dhow Triumph of Righteousness during a return voyage from Aden to East Africa, recounted in this work, with particular regard to Kuwait, Bahrain, and Muscat. An intriguing appendix offers a short analysis of the "economics of a deep-sea dhow", including data on the cost of constructing and outfitting the Triumph, the profit gained from trading goods during the voyage, the relative percentage of the profits assigned to each member of the crew, and the amount of provisions consumed. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, maps printed on free endpapers. With dust jacket. Frontispiece and 35 half-tone plates after photographs by the author. Bump to spine head, contents clean; jacket spine toned, otherwise bright, a couple of creases and nicks, unclipped: a near-fine copy in like jacket. Macro 2250.