Exhibition hopes to preserve disappearing sailboats of Bangladesh

Two visitors look at a display of models of wooden boats at a recent exhibition in Dhaka.

'The boats used to go south with the current in summer and use the winds in winter; to go north they used the monsoon winds in summer but in winter the crew would have to literally tow the boat.

'It was the way it had been done for centuries but it meant you couldn't guarantee a delivery being made on a particular date,' Marre said.

In the early to mid 1980s the removal of duty on diesel made engines more affordable.

'Then there was also this big source of scrap steel from the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh. People started building steel boats because they were five times cheaper than wooden boats.'

By the 1990s, steel boats were replacing wooden ones all over the country making thousands of boatbuilders redundant and forcing them to turn to general carpentry to make a living.

Marre, a former flight attendant, had always loved sailing and at the age of 33 sold his flat in Paris and gave up his job to cross the Atlantic solo in a yacht.

Eight years ago he settled in Bangladesh and bought a country boat to rent out for day trips. He quickly realised that the boats were on the verge of extinction and decided to find a way of preserving them for future generations.

'I am not complaining about the fact that these boats have disappeared because it is good for the country that the boats are more reliable, but they were beautiful boats and I don't want them to slip from people's memory completely,' he said.

'The skills and the knowledge are all being lost because fathers traditionally passed on their craft to their sons. We realised that there was a very small window of opportunity to save this knowledge.'

Through his own boat Marre struck up a friendship with some jobless boat builders and offered them salaried jobs making scale models.

In addition to the models produced for the exhibition, one model of each style of boat will be kept to help reconstruct full-size versions for the museum.

'When we get the go-ahead for the museum we will ask the carpenters to make the boats they used to build. If that's not possible we will get architects to make up plans from the models,' he said.