Until half a century ago, electricity was virtually unknown in Abu Dhabi, let alone power tools. So the boat-builders of the island had to carry out their trade entirely by hand.
Video: 3. Boat drill - 1950s/1960s
A wooden boat drill used for drilling holes in the days before electricity.
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This remarkable tool made things a little easier. Footage captured by Alain St Hilaire, a French documentary-maker who visited the shipyards of Al Bateen in the 1960s, shows how effective it could be. The worker can drill holes in wood with surprising speed, one hand performing a motion that resembles a violinist's bowing while the other holds the metal tip of the drill bit against the timbers of the dhow hull.
Frauke Heard-Bey, the distinguished Gulf historian and current owner of the drill, describes it as "the forerunner of the Black & Decker drill".
Until the early 1960s, Al Bateen was a village separate from the main town of Abu Dhabi, with its inhabitants engaged mostly in fishing and boat-building. As Abu Dhabi grew, it became a district of the city and is perhaps now most familiar for the InterContinental hotel, opened in 1980.
The last of the boat-building yards disappeared from Al Bateen in early 2008, when the harbour area was cleared for the construction of a new Fishermen's Marina, but boat-building itself has not entirely left the locality. It is still possible to find vessels, usually smaller racing dhows, being constructed on empty sand lots in the quiet residential backstreets behind Bainunah Street.
The modern boat-builder, though, has embraced the Black & Decker.
