JUNK. The sails of this Chinese ship are made of bamboo slats braced by bamboo rods. The rudder is so big that often a dozen men have to work on it. Many junks have colored sails.
WEGIAN SHIPS. Old Viking ships that sailed from Norway had both oars and brightly decorated sails. Vikings were such good seamen they crossed the Atlantic in their open ships. Norwegians are still seafarers. Boys who want to be sailors get training on a sailing ship.
Lars used to work on a tanker that brought oil from the Persian Gulf. When he went ashore there, he saw boats just like the earliest ones that men invented thousands of years ago. He saw boats that were really big, round clay pots, built by people in places where there was plenty of clay but very little wood. He saw huge basket boats woven from a kind of grass and waterproofed with a covering of tar. Some of the basket boats were big enough to carry twenty passengers—or several men and three horses!
Smaller basket boats were used as lighters. (A lighter is any craft that helps to unload freight from another.) Here on the Tigris River, the freight was carried on a large raft supported by animal skins blown up like balloons. A little raft floating downstream sometimes carried its owner, his donkey and the grain he had to sell. After selling the grain, the boatman took the skins from under the raft, let the air out, piled them on the donkey’s back and walked back home upriver.
Out at sea, whenever Lars sees a life raft on the top deck, he realizes it is just like the skin-float rafts he saw on the Tigris River. Instead of blown-up skins, water-tight metal containers filled with air hold the life raft up. When Lars puts on his life jacket for lifeboat drill, he is getting ready to use a float, just the way people long ago used bundles of reeds. Even though men have learned so much about ships in all the years since they first started to travel on water, they still use some of the first knowledge they ever acquired.
All of these things interest Lars. He grew up by the sea in Norway, and his people have been seamen since the days of the Vikings. But best of all he likes the clean, modern, comfortable tankers. He is not only going somewhere himself when he is on a tanker. He is also helping to carry a cargo that helps other people to go places.