Photo. Underwood
A MODERN CHINESE JUNK ON THE CANTON RIVER
During the first Han dynasty (about 206 B.C.) junks [[25]]of “one thousand kin” (about 15 tons) were regarded as very large vessels. In these boats the early Chinese navigators appear to have reached Korea and Japan. But long before they took to the sea there were other mariners in the China sea.
The Chinese were, as stated, originally an inland people. They were acquainted with river kufas (coracles) before they reached the seashore. These resembled the kufas of the Babylonians referred to by Herodotus, who wrote:
“The boats which come down the river to Babylon are circular, and made of skins. The frames, which are of willow, are cut in the country of the Armenians above Assyria, and on these, which serve for hulls, a covering of skins is stretched outside, and thus the boats are made, without either stem or stern, quite round like a shield.”[1]
These kufas are still in use in Mesopotamia. They do not seem to have altered much since the days of Hammurabi, or even of Sargon of Akkad. The Assyrians crossed rivers on skin floats, and some of the primitive peoples of mid-Asia are still using the inflated skins of cows as river “ferry-boats”. But such contrivances hardly enter into the history of shipping. The modern liner did not “evolve” from either kufa or skin float. Logs of wood were, no doubt, used to cross rivers at an early period. The idea of utilizing these may have been suggested to ancient hunters who saw animals being carried down on trees during a river flood. But attempts to utilize a tree for crossing a river would have been disastrous when first made, if the hunters were unable to swim. Trees are so apt to roll round in water. Besides, they would be useless if not guided with a punting-pole, expertly manipulated. Early man must have learned [[26]]how to navigate a river by using, to begin with, at least two trees lashed together. In Egypt and Babylonia we find traces of his first attempts in this connection. The reed float, consisting of two bundles of reeds, and the raft to which the inflated skins of animals were attached to give it buoyancy, were in use at an early period on the Rivers Nile and Euphrates. A raft of this kind had evidently its origin among a people accustomed, as were the later Assyrians, to use skin floats when swimming across rivers. There are sculptured representations of the Assyrian soldiers swimming with inflated skins under their chests.
The reed float was in use at a very early period on the Nile. Professor Breasted says that the two prehistoric floats were “bound firmly together, side by side, like two huge cigars”, and adds the following interesting note: “The writer was once without a boat in Nubia, and a native from a neighbouring village at once hurried away and returned with a pair of such floats made of dried reeds from the Nile shores. On this somewhat precarious craft he ferried the writer over a wide channel to an island in the river. It was the first time that the author had ever seen this contrivance, and it was not a little interesting to find a craft which he knew only in the Pyramid texts of 5000 years ago still surviving and in daily use on the ancient river in far-off Nubia.”
In the Pyramid texts there are references to the reed floats used by the souls of kings when being ferried across the river to death. The gods “bind together the two floats for this King Pepi”, runs a Pyramid text. “The knots are tied, the ferry-boats are brought together”, says another, and there are allusions to the ferryman (the prehistoric Charon) standing in the stern and poling the float. Before the Egyptian sun-god was [[27]]placed in a boat, he had “two floats of the sky” to carry him along the celestial Nile to the horizon.[2]
The “dug-out” canoe was probably developed from the raft. Men who drifted timber down a river may have had the idea of a “dug-out” suggested to them by first shaping a seat on a log, or a “hold” to secure the food-supply for the river voyage. Pitt Rivers suggests that after the discovery was made that a hollowed log could be utilized in water, “the next stage in the development of the canoe would consist in pointing the ends”.[3]