Primitive craft in arid lands.
In treeless lands, reeds growing on the margins of streams and lakes are utilized for the construction of boats. The Buduma islanders of Lake Chad use clumsy skiffs eighteen feet long, made of hollow reeds tied into bundles and then lashed together in a way to form a slight cavity on top.[533] In the earliest period of Egyptian history this type of boat with slight variations was used in the papyrus marshes of the Nile,[534] and it reappears as the ambatch boat which Schweinfurth observed on the upper White Nile.[535] It is in use far away among the Sayads or Fowlers, who inhabit the reed-grown rim of the Sistan Lake in arid Persia.[536] As the Peruvian balsa, it has been the regular means of water travel on Lake Titicaca since the time of the Incas, and in more primitive form it appears among the Shoshone Indians of the Snake River Valley of Idaho, who used this device in their treeless land to cross the streams, when the water was too cold for swimming.[537] Still cruder rafts of reeds, without approach to boat form, were the sole vehicles of navigation among the backward Indians of San Francisco Bay, and were the prevailing craft among the coast Indians farther south and about the Gulf of Lower California.[538] Trees abounded; but these remnant tribes of low intelligence, probably recent arrivals on the coast from the interior, equipped only with instruments of bone and stone, found the difficulty of working with wood prohibitive.
The second step in the elaboration of water conveyance was made when mere flotation was succeeded by various devices to secure displacement. The evolution is obvious. The primitive raftsman of the Mesopotamian rivers wove his willow boughs and osiers into a large, round basket form, covered it with closely sewn skins to render it water-tight, and in it floated with his merchandise down the swift current from Armenia to Babylon. These were the boats which Herodotus saw on the Euphrates,[539] and which survive to-day.[540] According to Pliny, the ancient Britons used a similar craft, framed of wicker-work and covered with hide, in which they crossed the English and Irish channels to visit their kinsfolk on the opposite shores. This skin boat or coracle or currach still survives on the rivers of Wales and the west coast of Ireland, where it is used by the fishermen and considered the safest craft for stormy weather.[541] It recalls the "bull-skin boat" used in pioneer days on the rivers of our western plains, and the skiffs serving as passenger ferries to-day on the rivers of eastern Tibet.[542] It reappears among the Arikara Indians of the upper Missouri,[543] and the South American tribes of the Gran Chaco.[544] The first wooden boat was made of a tree trunk, hollowed out either by fire or axe. The wide geographical distribution of the dug-out and its survival in isolated regions of highly civilized lands point it out as one of those necessary and obvious inventions that must have been made independently in various parts of the world.
Relation of the river to marine navigation.
The quieter water of rivers and lakes offered the most favorable conditions for the feeble beginnings of navigation, but the step from inland to marine navigation was not always taken. The Egyptians, who had well-constructed river and marine boats, resigned their maritime commerce to Phoenicians and Greeks, probably, as has been shown, because the silted channels and swamps of the outer Nile delta held them at arm's length from the sea. Similarly the equatorial lakes of Central Africa have proved fair schools of navigation, where the art has passed the initial stages of development. The kingdom of Uganda on Victoria Nyanza, at the time of Stanley's visit, could muster a war fleet of 325 boats, a hundred of them measuring from fifty to seventy feet in length; the largest were manned by a crew of sixty-four paddlers and could carry as many more fighting men.[545] The long plateau course of the mighty Congo has bred a race of river navigators, issuing from their riparian villages to attack the traveler in big flotillas of canoes ranging from fifty to eighty-five feet in length, the largest of them driven through the water by eighty paddlers and steered by eight more paddles in the stern.[546] But the Congo and lake boats are barred from the coast by a series of cataracts, which mark the passage of the drainage streams down the escarpment of the plateau.
Retarded navigation.
There are peoples without boats or rafts of any description. Among this class are the Central Australians, Bushmen, navigation. Hottentots and Kaffirs of arid South Africa,[547] and with few exceptions also the Damaras. Even the coast members of these tribes only wade out into the shallow water on the beach to spear fish. The traveler moving northward from Cape Town through South Africa, across its few scant rivers, goes all the way to Ngami Lake before he sees anything resembling a canoe, and then only a rude dugout. Still greater is the number of people who, though inhabiting well indented coasts, make little use of contact with the sea. Navigation, unknown to many Australian coast tribes, is limited to miserable rafts of mangrove branches on the northwest seaboard, and to imperfect bark canoes with short paddles on the south; only in the north where Malayan influences are apparent does the hollowed tree-stem with outrigger appear.[548] This retardation is not due to fear, because the South Australian native, like the Fuegian, ventures several miles out to sea in his frail canoe; it is due to that deep-seated inertia which characterizes all primitive races, and for which the remote, outlying location of peninsular South America, Southern Africa and Australia, before the arrival of the Europeans, afforded no antidote in the form of stimulating contact with other peoples. But the Irish, who started abreast of the other northern Celts in nautical efficiency, who had advantages of proximity to other shores, and in the early centuries of their history sailed to the far-away Faroes and even to Iceland, peopled southern Scotland by an oversea emigration, made piratical descents upon the English coast, and in turn received colonies of bold Scandinavian mariners, suffered an arrested development in navigation, and failed to become a sea-faring folk.