Naval Dockyard (Mumbai)

[2] The Yard was established in 1735 by the East India Company, which brought in shipwrights from their base at Surat in order to construct vessels using Malabar teak.

One of their number, Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia, was (along with several generations of his descendants) a key figure in the success of the Yard, as indicated in The New Cambridge History of India: Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India:[1] Between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries Indian shipyards produced a series of vessels incorporating these hybrid features.

A contemporary British traveller, Abraham Parsons, described it as follows in 1775:[3] Here is a dock-yard, large and well contrived, with all kind of naval stores deposited in proper warehouses, together with great quantities of timber and planks for repairing and building ships, and forges for making of anchors, as well as every kind of smaller smiths’ work.

Near the dock-yard is a rope walk, which for length, situation, and conveniency, equals any in England, that in the king’s yard at Portsmouth only excepted, and, like that, it has a covering to shelter the workmen from the inclemency of the weather in all seasons.

Here are made cables and all sorts of lesser cordage, both for the royal navy, the company’s marine, and the merchant, ships which trade to these parts of India.

Malabar, is, however, very good, and great quantities of it are, brought to Bombay; it is called tiek, and will last in a-hot climate longer than any wood whatever.In 1811 the British Royal Navy took over the Yard, continuing to work with the Wadia family as Master Shipwrights.