Sailing ships

by E. Keble Chatterton

The Valdermoor boat has the following dimensions: length 41 feet, greatest width 4.33 feet, depth inside 19 inches, depth outside 20½ inches. The thickness of the wood is 1½ inches at the bottom and 1¼ at the top. The boat had eleven ribs, of which nine now exist. On the gunwale between the ribs, eleven holes were made for inserting oars. Both the stem and stern are sharp. The keel, 6½ feet in length, is worked out of the wood at both ends of the boat, leaving the middle flat. I am sorry not to be able to present an illustration of this before the reader, but the director of the Kiel Museum informs me that the boat is in such a position as to prevent it being photographed.

However, the Brigg boat is very similar to the Valdermoor and may serve the purposes of illustration equally well. This craft was found by workmen excavating for a new gasometer upon the banks of the river Ancholme, in North Lincolnshire. It had been resting apparently on the clay bottom of the sloping beach of an old lagoon. It was obviously made out of the trunk of a tree, and perfectly straight, its dimensions being: 48 feet 6 inches long, about 6 feet wide, 2 feet 9 inches deep. The stern represents the butt end of a tree with diameter of 5 feet 3 inches. The cubic contents of the boat would be about 700 cubic feet. The prow is rounded off as if intended for a ram, and a cavity in the head of the prow appears to have been intended for a bowsprit, whereby the forestay could be made fast. In fact, a piece of crooked oak suitable for this purpose was found adjacent to the prow. Whilst the bottom of this dug-out is flat, the sides are perpendicular and there is a kind of overhanging counter at the stern.

The boat was formerly in the possession of Mr. V. Cary-Elwes, F.S.A.,[27] to whom I have to express my thanks for his courtesy in supplying me with some information regarding the boat here reproduced. The ship was offered by this gentleman to the British Museum, but was declined as being too big. It therefore remains in a small provincial town difficult of access and for the most part unknown. It would be impossible to remove the craft now, without risk of total destruction, but is it not a little humiliating that continental and provincial museums should see fit to harbour similar relics as this Brigg boat, while our great national store-house refuses a gift of such importance? I make no apology to the reader for giving in detail the result of this Brigg discovery, for it is one of the finest if not the most instructive of any craft of this kind that has come to light in Northern Europe. An interesting account has been written by the Rev. D. Cary-Elwes, son of the above, and to this I am indebted for some of the following facts.[28]

Fig. 25. The Viking Boat dug up at Brigg. Lincolnshire.

The boat is hollowed out of one huge oak log, which, from the dimensions given above, would necessitate a tree 18 feet in circumference, and of such a height that the branches did not begin until 50 feet from the ground. Such a tree would be gigantic. The bows are almost a semi-circle when viewed from above, and are rounded off gradually to the bottom and sides, the latter being about two inches thick and the bottom four inches. The stern, however, is no less than sixteen inches. The transom has had to be fixed separately on to the trunk, and the difficulty was to perform such a piece of shipbuilding so as to make this part of the vessel as strong and water-tight as the sides and bottom. The caulking of the joints has been done with moss, the transom fitting into a groove across the floor. In order that the sides of the ship might not give, in bad weather, Mr. Cary-Elwes thinks, a tight lashing was thrown across from one side to the other, coming round abaft of the stern, and so keeping both sides and transom tightly together. This transom was found a little distance away from the boat and is 4 feet wide at the top and 2 feet 5¾ inches deep, there being a projection some 2 feet aft, beyond the transom, so as to form an overhanging counter.

Along the whole length of the boat, close to the upper edge, holes, 2 inches in diameter, have been pierced at irregular intervals of about 2 feet. It is uncertain what these were intended for. Although there are no such evidences as a step for the mast, to indicate whether she was a sailing boat, it is not safe to condemn her as having merely been propelled by paddles. There are evidences of decks and seats, and the primitive man would, no doubt, after he had learned to harness the wind, maintain his mast in position perhaps by thongs to the seat or by means of the decking. It has even been thought that the fragment of rounded wood found with the boat and already alluded to as a probable bowsprit, was a mast. To me this latter supposition seems more likely than the theory of a bowsprit. It has also been surmised that the holes running along the boat were either for lacing to keep the ship’s sides from coming asunder or for receptacles of pegs to hold washboards in bad weather. Personally, I think the latter is the more probable, for it was a very early custom. We have, in a former chapter, mentioned it as being a practice on the Mediterranean in classical times, and we shall see presently that the Vikings also used this method for keeping out the spray. It happens also to be the custom among modern savages.

Evidently during her career of activity this vessel had the misfortune to spring a leak, for she has been patched, and the work of the boatbuilder is most interesting to us of to-day. On the starboard bilge a rift of 12 feet long has been made. To repair this, wooden patches and moss have been used. The biggest patch is 5 feet 8 inches long and 6½ inches wide in the middle, tapering gradually to a point at either end, and is of oak. The patch was let into the rift from the outside until perfectly flush with the outer part of the boat. On the inner side of the patch, three cleats a foot long and four inches deep, with a hole in the centre of each, have been attached. Wooden pins were passed through these holes, so that pressing firmly against the solid wood on either side of the rift, they kept the repair in position. Besides this, holes three-eighths of an inch in diameter were made along the outer edges of the patch, corresponding holes being also made in the fabric of the boat by means of which the patch could be sewn to the ship with thongs. This custom, it seems to me, would have survived in the most natural manner from the time when the shipbuilder sewed the seams of his skin boat. Finally, all holes and crannies were caulked with moss. Mr. Cary-Elwes has carefully preserved a small portion of this lacing material, which appears to be of some animal substance, and probably twisted sinews. He has also taken some of this caulking moss from the boat and finds that it is of two kinds, both of which grow on sandy soils in woods, and are now largely used in the manufacture of moss-baskets and artificial flowers.

The important fact must not be lost sight of that while all the repairs have been made either by wood pegs or thongs, not a trace of metal was found in the fabric of the boat. This coincides with the argument that we have been proceeding on, viz., that such ships as these belong not to the age of metals but to that of stone. And, as if to convince those who scoff at the possibility of being able to fell trees—and oak trees especially—by means of stone implements, Mr. Cary-Elwes refers to the interesting fact that the Australian aborigines, a type of humanity as low and primitive as one could wish to find, had all their tools of agriculture, war and forestry, made of stone or wood, iron being unknown to them; yet indeed they knew how to fell the giants of the forest, such a tree as the Jarrah red gum, now used for paving London streets, being every bit as hard as our oak. “Within quite recent times,” adds the same author, “the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands worked exclusively with stone implements. I came across a good collection of these old time weapons in New Zealand, and what is more to the point here, sundry canoes and boats hollowed by their means. My father, who was with me, and who is a member of the Society of Antiquaries, and not unlearned in these matters, pointed out to me not only the similarity that existed between these stone weapons and the prehistoric adzes and axes of the stone age, but also the interesting fact that the canoes hollowed out by fire or stone tools were as cleanly cut and as cleverly wrought as the old Brigg boat.” The same writer, from the evidence of the geological strata where she was found, concludes that the age of the Brigg boat must be between 2600 and 3000 years, which would bring the date to between 1100 and 700 B.C.

In addition to the Brigg boat other dug-outs have been found in various parts of our country. In 1833 one was discovered near the river Arun in Sussex. Her length was 35 feet, breadth 4 feet, depth 2 feet. Her sides and bottom were between 4 and 5 inches thick. There are also other similarities to the Brigg boat. In 1863 a smaller, but similar boat, 8 feet 2 inches by 1 foot 9 inches, was also unearthed. She had washboards like those we have attributed to the Brigg boat. Another craft a foot smaller still was found near Dumfries in 1736, containing a paddle. In 1822 near the Rother in Kent an immense ship of this class measuring 63 feet long, and 5 feet broad was unearthed also. It is interesting to remark that it was caulked with moss in the manner already described. On the south bank of the Clyde another of these craft was found having an upright groove in the stern similar to that in which the sternboard of the Brigg boat was fixed. There is also a twenty-five footer in the Museum at York.