BOAT BUILDING ON THE LOGIER RIVER.
One of the most beautiful little vessels we ever saw was built by the wrecked crew of a French steamer. She was 40ft. long and 8ft. or 10ft. beam, clinker-built, with thin and narrow planks, without a joint in their whole length, sawed out of the mainmast, and flexible ribs about a foot apart and not more than one inch in breadth or thickness. Her deck beams were, of course, somewhat more rigid, to sustain the weight of the men who crowded her. She was said to have sailed eleven knots.
Wattled boat.
Our friend, Mr. Wilson, an experienced African traveller, recommends a wattled or basket-work boat, and in a country where rattans, osiers, or flexible twigs, or green reeds, are obtainable, such a boat would be both light and durable; but it would be open to objection on the score of unavoidable roughness, and inequality of outer surface, which would impede its progress through the water, and expose parts of the canvas covering to constant liability to chafe whenever it touched the ground. Even if a traveller intends to purchase or hire native canoes, it is indispensable that he should have some small portable boat of his own, sufficient at least to show the natives that he is not totally helpless on the water and dependent on them.
In the case of our copper boat, illustrated at [page 53], we have already remarked that the difficulties of the road, and the mortality among Mr. Chapman’s cattle, obliged us to leave behind eight of the sections. The method we adopted with the other four is shown in our full-page illustration, representing boat-building on the Logier River.
On account of the danger from the tsetse, or poisonous cattle fly, our friend’s waggons could not be taken to the banks of the Zambesi, and everything had to be carried by the Damara servants and hired natives to Logier Hill, about eighty miles below the Victoria Falls, which we had selected as the first place from which continuous downward navigation was possible.
The building of the house will come more properly under its own heading, and we will now only treat of what concerns the boat.
About the 3rd of October, or towards the close of the dry season, we cut down a motchicheerie tree, which divided a little above the ground into two tolerably straight logs of manageable dimensions. These were first notched with the axe on the side we intended to “fall” them; the cross-cut saw was then “put in” as far as it would go without nipping from the pressure of the wood, and a notch being made on the other side, the saw was used freely, the weight of the tree on the “falling” side opening the cut as the work proceeded.