Boating

by Walter Bradford Woodgate

This is the point which ingenious commentators, who have given elaborate designs and figures of Ulysses’ boat and written pages upon its construction, seem to have missed. The poet has added colour to his picture by bringing the new and the old together. And of a truth new and old exist together and continue throughout the ages of man in marvellous juxtaposition. The fast screw liner off the Australian coast may pass the naked savage oaring himself with swarthy palms upon his buoyant log, and almost every stage of modern invention in ship-building and ship propulsion has had alongside it the three-timbered sanpan, and the original types of raft that float in the Malay Archipelago.

But we must follow the development of our special pastime through its embryonic stage to a moment when, all unknown and unseen in the womb of time, like the sudden changes which differentiate the gradual ascents from a lower to a higher being, unseen, unknown, and unwritten in history, that great event occurred, the birth of the first ‘dug-out’ canoe. Unnoticed perhaps at the time, the importance of the event was recognised by the poet in after ages as a real forward step in the onward progress of the arts.[1] ‘Rivers then first the hollowed alders felt.’

[1] Virg. Georg. i. 136: ‘Tunc alnos primum fluvii sensere cavatas.’

To some primitive man or men in advance of their fellow men, the idea of flotation, as apart from the mere buoyancy of the material, had occurred, and suggested the hollowing out of the log. Wherever and whenever this was first effected, it was a great event in the world’s progress. A simple thought had wedded fact destined to be fruitful to all future ages. O prototype of the longboat—of the frail eights which freighted with contending crews speed yearly over Father Thames amidst the cheers and applause of thousands! Where wast thou launched? What dusky arms propelled thee? What wild songs of exultation heralded thy first successful venture? Once achieved, what present benefits, what future triumphs didst thou not ensure to man? In the power of carrying something, or anything beside the living freight, dry and secure, and in the increased facility of movement and of turning, must have been manifest from the first the advantage of the canoe over the raft, where the lapping of the water and the wash of the wave, in spite of all contrivances, could scarce be kept out. How soon must efforts have been made to increase this advantage to obtain greater carrying power and greater speed! The application of the sail was made possible by the ingenious adaptation of the outrigger, a trunk of light wood laid parallel to the side of the dug-out at some feet distance, and attached to it by transverse bars. The oldest type and the type with this improvement still survive, and the ingenious models of such craft which were exhibited at the Fisheries Exhibition in London a few years ago will have been noticed by many of our readers. Twin vessels like the ‘Castalia,’ and, if we are to believe the learned Graser, the great Tesseraconteres of Ptolemy, had their primitive germ, so to speak, in this early stroke of genius. It may appear strange to some boating men who are accustomed to hear a good deal about outriggers, that this outrigger of which we have been speaking has nothing to do with the outrigger with which they are familiar. It never apparently passed into the Western Seas. The Mediterranean knows it not. The Andaman Islands and the Seychelles are its westernmost limits.

But if the invention of the dug-out canoe was a step onward in the general progress of the arts, being the appreciation and application of a principle in nature, a still greater triumph was achieved, and the particular art still more decidedly advanced, by him who first constructed the canoe properly so called. Herein was the real prototype of the species boat. A skin of bark, duly cut and shaped so as to taper towards the ends and be wide amidships, was attached to a longitudinal framework or gunwale all along its upper edges, and this itself was kept apart and in shape by three or more transverse pieces stretching from side to side, while a series of curved laths of soft wood, the extreme ends of which also fastened to the gunwale, served to keep the vessel itself in shape and to protect the bark skin from the tread of men and from the immediate incidence of any weight to be carried. ‘Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte.’ The idea once conceived, whether in one place or in many, and at whatever time or times, could not be lost and must soon have been fruitful in development. Of this class by far the most common is the birch-bark canoe, which, though found also in Australia, is properly regarded as having its home upon the American continent. If not the original of the type, yet it deserves particular attention owing to the peculiarity of the material of the skin, which combines lightness and toughness and pliability. A truly ingenious and original idea to flay a birch tree and make a boat of its skin! In the framework of the canoe we have the embryo ribs and inwale of the future boat, and the three cross-ties may be regarded as the ancestors of thwarts to be born in time to come. As yet no keel. But that was soon to be. Go north, and trees become scarcer and dwindle in size. The birch is no longer of sufficient girth to serve the ingenious savage in the construction of a canoe. But the inventive genius of man was not to be denied. Skins of beasts, or woven material made waterproof, stretched upon a frame would serve for the same purpose as bark. But a stronger framework was necessary for a material thinner and more pliable than bark. And accordingly in all this class (except the coracle) we find stronger and more numerous timbers, including a longitudinal piece from stem to stern, and uprights at each end acting as stempost and sternpost respectively. The rude canvas-covered vessels of Tory Island, off the west coast of Ireland, still preserve one development of this type, close at home to us; while the cayaks of the Esquimaux and the larger fishing canoes of the Alaskans and the Greenlanders exhibit the skin-clad variety in many forms. In one of the models exhibited at the Fisheries Exhibition the framework showed in great perfection the ingenuity of the savage, to whom wood was a very scarce and precious article, short pieces being made to serve fitted together and fastened with thongs of hide, the whole being covered with a stout walrus skin. Even outriggers (as understood by the English oarsman) made of double loops of hide just long enough to cross each other and enclose the loom of the oar, were attached to the inner side of the gunwale.

Not only bark and skin and canvas-covered canoes exist and seem to have existed from an unknown antiquity, but a similar cause to that of which we were just speaking, viz. a scarcity of wood or of suitable wood, led to the construction of canoes of wood made of short pieces stitched together, and approaching more nearly to the type of vessel which may be called a boat. To these belong the canoes of Easter Island made of drift wood, and of many other islands in the Pacific, which are truly canoes and propelled by paddles, and the same peculiarity of build extends to the Madras surf boats, which are more truly boats. Many of these are tied together through holes drilled or burnt through a ledge left on the inner side of the plank or log, a peculiarity noticeable as appearing even in the early vessels of the Northern Seas. The stitched boat has not a nail Or a peg in her whole composition, but the structure, though liable to leak, is admirably suited for heavy seas and surf-beaten coasts, and owing to its pliability will stand shocks which would shatter a stiffer and tighter build. This being so, it is not surprising that vessels larger than canoes or boats were constructed (some authorities say even as large as 200 tons burden) upon this principle, which is certainly one of very great antiquity.

There is also a curious analogy in the progress of construction of these sea-going craft with the natural order in the construction of fishes, that is to say, if the ganoids are to be considered antecedent to the vertebrates among the latter. For in the case of the stitched vessels the hull is the first thing in time and construction, the ribs and framework being, so to speak, an afterthought, and attached to the interior when the hull has been completed, whereas the later and modern practice is to set up the ribs and framework of the vessel first and to attach the exterior planking afterwards. But the invention of trenails and dowels must have preceded the later practice, and have led the way to the building of such boats as those described by Herodotus (ii. 96), the ancestors of the Nile ‘nuggur’ of modern times. Ulysses, as a shipwright well skilled in his craft, uses axe and adze and auger, and with the latter makes holes in the timbers he has squared and planed, and with trenails and dowels ties them together. The wooden fastenings, be it remarked, are in size and diameter severally adapted, the first to resist the horizontal, the second to resist the vertical strain to which the raft would be exposed upon the waves. All this, we may observe, points to a stage anterior to that in which the use of metal nails and ties in ship- and boat-building had been introduced. Trenails and dowels are however still in use, and have a natural advantage over iron in the construction of wooden vessels, owing to the absence of corrosion, which in early times must have caused difficulties as to its employment for boat-building. Copper, on the other hand, though free from this objection, would be less available by reason of expense and the great demand for it for other purposes.

And now we have reached a point where we enter upon the borders of history. No doubt, if we knew more about the venerable antiquity of China, we might be able to add interesting facts, showing the development from the earliest sanpan to the great river boats, and the growth of that curious art which produced the Chinese junk, a vessel undoubtedly of a very antique type. But this knowledge is not ours at present, and so we must turn to the equally venerable civilisation of Egypt for information upon the subject. In Egypt fortunately the tomb paintings have preserved to us a wealth of illustration of boats and ships, some of which, if we may trust the learned, take us back to dates as early as 3000 b.c. In turning over the interesting plates of such works as Lepsius’s ‘Denkmäler,’ or Duemichen’s ‘Fleet of an Egyptian Queen,’ we are struck by the reflection that, if at that early date boats, and ships, and oars, and steering paddles, and masts, and sailing gear had all been brought to such a stage of perfection, we must allow many centuries antecedent for the elaboration of such designs, and for the evolution of the savage man’s primary conception of canoe and paddle.