BOARDMAN, GEORGE DANA (1801-1831), American Baptist missionary, was born at Livermore, Me., and educated at Waterville College and Andover Theological Seminary. In 1825 he went to India as a missionary, and in 1827 to Burma, where his promising work among the Karens was cut short by his early death. His widow married another well-known Burmese missionary, Adoniram Judson.
His son, George Dana Boardman, the younger (1828-1903), made the voyage from Burma to America alone when six years of age. He graduated in 1852 at Brown University, and from the Newton Theological Institution in 1855. He held Baptist pastorates at Rochester (1856-1864), and at Philadelphia, and was president of the American Baptist Missionary Union, 1880-1884. At Philadelphia he is said to have taken his congregation through every verse of the New Testament in 643 Wednesday evening lectures, which occupied nearly eighteen years, and afterwards to have begun on the Old Testament in similar fashion. Among his published works are Studies in the Model Prayer (1879), and Epiphanies of the Risen Lord (1879).
BOASE, HENRY SAMUEL (1799-1883), English geologist, the eldest son of Henry Boase (1763-1827), banker, of Madron, Cornwall, was born in London on the 2nd of September 1799. Educated partly at Tiverton grammar-school, and partly at Dublin, where he studied chemistry, he afterwards proceeded to Edinburgh and took the degree of M.D. in 1821. He then settled for some years as a medical practitioner at Penzance; there geology engaged his particular attention, and he became secretary of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall. The results of his observations were embodied in his Treatise on Primary Geology (1834), a work of considerable merit in regard to the older crystalline and igneous rocks and the subject of mineral veins. In 1837 he removed to London, where he remained for about a year, being elected F.R.S. In 1838 he became partner in a firm of bleachers at Dundee. He retired in 1871, and died on the 5th of May 1883.
BOAT (O. Eng. bât; the true etymological connexion with Dutch and Ger. boot, Fr. bateau, Ital. battello presents great difficulties; Celtic forms are from O. Eng.), a comparatively small open craft for conveyance on water, usually propelled by some form of oar or sail.
The origin of the word “boat” is probably to be looked for in the A.S. bât = a stem, a stick, a piece of wood. If this be so, the term in its inception referred to the material of which the primitive vessel was constructed, and in this respect may well be contrasted with the word “ship,” of which the primary idea was the process by which the material was fashioned and adapted for the use of man.
We may assume that primitive man, in his earliest efforts to achieve the feat of conveying himself and his belongings by water, succeeded in doing so—(1) by fastening together a quantity of material of sufficient buoyancy to float and carry him above the level of the water; (2) by scooping out a fallen tree so as to obtain buoyancy enough for the same purpose. In these two processes is to be found the genesis of both boat and ship, of which, though often used as convertible terms, the former is generally restricted to the smaller type of vessel such as is dealt with in this article. For the larger type the reader is referred to [Ship].
Great must have been the triumph of the man who first discovered that the rushes or the trunks he had managed to tie together would, propelled by a stick or a branch (cf. ramus and remus) used as pole or paddle, convey him safely across the river or lake, which had hitherto been his barrier. But use multiplies wants, discovers deficiencies, suggests improvements. Man soon found out that he wanted to go faster than the raft would move, that the water washed over and up through it, and this need of speed, and of dry carrying power, which we find operative throughout the history of the boat down to the present day, drove him to devise other modes of flotation as well as to try to improve his first invention.
The invention of the hollowed trunk, of the “dug-out” (monoxylon), however it came about, whenever and wherever it came into comparison with the raft, must have superseded the latter for some purposes, though not by any means for all. It was superior to the raft in speed, and was, to a certain extent, water-tight. On the other hand it was inferior in carrying power and stability. But the two types once conceived had come to stay, and to them severally, or to attempts to combine the useful properties of both, may be traced all the varieties of vessel to which the name of boat may be applied.