The final 21 small boats from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich were delivered to the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall last week, completing the small boat collection at the Falmouth exhibition centre which opened in 2002.

A total of five lorry loads of small boats arrived in Falmouth during the week with the first delivery on Tuesday 3 July which included a 9 metre long Canadian Birch Bark Canoe built by Ontario lumbermen around 1901. She was presented to King Edward VII when he visited Canada in 1901 and has been lent to the Museum by HM Queen.

On Friday 6 July, the final lorry arrived with a 7 metre long Kuwaiti sailing Dhow which, due to its 3 ton weight and odd shape, had to be offloaded by crane. The Dhow, or Tishaala, Tala was commissioned in the mid 1990s, and built by a master shipwright, Haj Ali Abd al Rasool who had learned to build Dhows in the traditional way through skills handed down through generation to generation. However, Ali unfortunately died before the Dhow was complete and she was finished by his younger brother Haj Hasan.

Tishaalas vary greatly in size and were traditionally designed for local cargo to be carried around Kuwait and up to Basra, although Tala was built for recreation.

Tala’s hull was coated in fish oil once a year, above the waterline, to protect her teak planking from the sun and sea: traditional antifouling would have been a mixture of lime and ghee applied hot, but Tala’s is the more conventional type.

For details of museum opening times and more information about the small boat collections go to nmmc.co.uk.