The Boy's Own Book of Indoor Games and Recreations / A Popular Encyclopædia for Boys

by C. Stansfeld Hicks; John Nevil Maskelyne; Gordon Stables

This is as simple a raft as any recorded in shipwreck annals. But what is a raft? It is indeed a difficult thing to define. Rafts are of all shapes and sizes, varying from the few booms of the Fairlie up to the elaborate raft of the Medusa, of which the model was shown in the London Fisheries Exhibition. A raft would seem to be any floating substance on which a man can sit or stand. Boys have paddled in a pond on rafts of a couple of planks, soldiers have crossed rivers on rafts of barn-doors, and we hear of armies using rafts of house-roofs, and wooden-shed walls, and casks and inflated skins, and pontoons of all shapes, of tin, zinc, copper, iron, leather, wood, and canvas.

Perhaps the simplest kind of river raft is that common in South Africa, where a stack of reeds some fifty feet in diameter is pushed into the water and allowed to float down stream, each day, as the under stems get waterlogged, more being cut from the banks and thrown on to the heap. A similar rough raft is not uncommon amongst us in winter, when the ice is very thin, for if a heap of reeds is then thrown on to a slab of ice, and well watered, a solid mass can be built up with alternate layers of reeds and ice which will float considerable weights. Besides the floating stack there is another reed raft in use amongst the Kaffirs, made of a mattress of reeds about four feet long, three feet broad, and eight inches thick, tied together with strips of the reeds themselves, with reed posts and railing round.

Skins stretched and inflated are in use all over the globe for raft purposes. In Peru a hide pinched up at the corners, secured there with a thorn, and dried in the sun, furnishes the only boat. In another American form we have holes bored all round the edge, a thong run through them and pulled tight over a framework of withies,—in fact, a coracle such as the Celts were so fond of, the washing basket with the waterproof covering which exists on the coast of Ireland to this day.

The contracting force exercised by skins as they dry has a great deal to do with the water-tight qualities of hide boats, as, in all cases, the framework is covered as soon as possible after the death of the animal.

It is astonishing what simple things have been made into boats. Admiral Fitzroy once sent a party of sailors ashore, and while they were encamped their boat was stolen. Out of the boughs of the trees around them they made a large basket, covered it with their canvas tent, puddled the inside with a little clay, and put to sea, spending eighteen hours in this crazy contrivance before they got back to safety.

Alexander’s army passed the Indus, as Hannibal’s did the Rhine, on rafts made of inflated skins, or of skins stuffed with hay. On the Tigris and elsewhere at this very day such goat-skin rafts are still in use. The skins are lashed to a framework with one of the legs of each animal upwards; through this leg the air is driven in, and, as the traveller journeys down the stream, he visits the skins in succession and blows in fresh air to make up for what has escaped. A single ox-hide when inflated is said to make a float capable of sustaining three hundred pounds.

Casks are almost invaluable in raft-making, and many a shipwrecked crew has been saved on a platform lashed to floating barrels. One of the early lifeboats simply consisted of a boat with holes bored in her bottom and empty casks lashed inside her, the casks giving the floating power while the shape of the boat was retained. Four spars lashed together with a cask at each corner and a square of canvas fixed on them was all that one of the patent life-rafts consisted of.

Casks furnish great floating power in such a convenient form that it is hardly to be wondered at that they have been used over and over again in the construction of military bridges where boats have been unattainable. They are, however, but a makeshift, pontoons nowadays being always carried. When Darius crossed the Bosphorus and afterwards the Danube he did it on a bridge of boats oft very elaborate construction. When Xerxes crossed the Hellespont he had two bridges, one consisting of three hundred and sixty vessels anchored side by side and head to stern, and another, nearer the Archipelago, of three hundred and fourteen vessels similarly anchored. These were connected by cables, a platform of planks was laid stretching from each to each, and on the platform from shore to shore there was laid a thick bed of earth to form the road on which the Persian hosts passed into Europe. At Xenophon’s passage of the Tigris thirty-seven vessels were used.

The most famous boat-bridge in modern times was that thrown by the British over the Adour when Wellington invaded France. The bridge was 810 feet long, and was at first supported on hawsers, which were kept tight by capstans placed in the centre of each of the thirty to forty-ton chassemarées which formed the piers. These chassemarées were moored side by side at a distance of forty feet from each other’s centres, so that the intervals were equal. The platform was after a day or two shifted on to balks. To protect the bridge a boom was thrown across the river on each side of it. The best of the raft-bridges was Sokolniki’s over the Niemen at Grodno in 1792. The trunks, fifty to sixty feet long and about two feet in diameter, were lashed together in tens and joined end to end until they reached across the stream. The bridge was three hundred and sixty yards in length, and formed a great curve towards the current, with the centre of the curve supported by an anchored vessel. These trunks were lashed together. A better plan, however, is that adopted by the Canadian timber-men, who cross-lay their rafts, bore an auger-hole at the corners through both thicknesses, and fix a wedge in the cleft end of the stick which keeps them together. As the stick is driven home the wedge is forced upwards into the end and makes all fast.

On the coast of India it is a very common thing to see two or three natives afloat on a raft made of three logs of wood—of the pine varnish-tree—the centre log being about five-and-twenty feet long and the breadth of the three together about a yard. These rafts are manœuvred with very great dexterity, and safely brave the roughest seas. Similar to them is the Brazilian catamaran, which carries a large triangular sail.