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Blog postThe Politics of the Canoe, edited by Bruce Erickson and Sarah Wylie Krotz, is a book of a different sort than that from which I normally obtain content for this blog or choose to review. A collection of essays, mostly academic in nature, it does not address the nuts and bolts of boat design, construction, or usage. As its title indicates, its central theme is the political implications of canoes. The book has no subtitle, but one would have been useful to clarify that its focus is upon the ca
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Blog postThere are strong but superficial similarities between The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia, a new book by Harri Luukkanen and William W. Fitzhugh, and the 1964 classic The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle. Obviously, there is the title, clearly meant as a respectful acknowledgement of the older work. The two books have the same publisher (Smithsonian), and the same format, both being oversize, printed in black and white,
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Blog postLogboats are probably the best-known Amerindian watercraft in Guyana, but another boat type in common use – at least into the first half of the 20th century – is the bark canoe. Although terminology differs among various writers, the term “woodskin” is commonly applied to all Guyanese bark canoes.
Akawai open-ended woodskin on the Mazaruni River (Roth, W., 1924:plate 177) Click any image to enlarge.
The most common type of woodskin appears to have been the one with open ends, which w -
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Blog postThis is the second in a series of posts on ancient boat iconography at the British Museum. The first post looked at ancient Egyptian boat models. (Click any image to enlarge.)
Dating from the second phase of the Naqada culture (3500–3200 BC) in what is now Egypt, this is one of the earliest undoubted images of a boat with a sail from anywhere in the world. The medium-aspect squaresail, hung from a mast stepped far toward the bow, appears to have a boom along the bottom edge. As the mast cr -
Blog postWhen it comes to studying the earliest watercraft, direct archaeological evidence, in the form of artefactual boats and ships, is extremely rare and fragmentary. In contrast, the iconography of ancient boats -- in the form of models, relief carvings, images on pottery, etc. -- is relatively abundant, and often well-preserved. If you read enough nautical history or archaeology, you'll come across a number of oft-used images that provide some of our best clues about the design and construction of
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Blog postThe papyrella built for the Exeter Maritime Museum, now held by the National Maritime Museum of Poland, photographed in Suffolk, England by Bob Holtzman (click any image to enlarge).Rafts made of reeds are among the oldest types of watercraft, and remained in use in many areas through the end of the previous millennium “wherever there is a good supply of reeds” (McGrail, 2001:21, 104). Papyrus, among the most common reeds used for raft building, may have been among the earliest as well
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Blog post(This post is slightly revised from a paper submitted for a class in Materials, Technology and Social Life at University of Southampton, 2018.)
Referring to wooden tubs, buckets, flasks, and cups recovered at Sutton Hoo, Comey (2013:109) wrote, “A fundamental aspect of any wooden object is the species of tree or woody shrub from which it originates. Identification of species is an important consideration for understanding these wooden vessels and this is true of all archaeolo -
Blog postPersistence of Logboats in Latin America: a framework to assess prospects of survival
(This essay is slightly modified from one written for a course in the maritime aspects of culture at University of Southampton.)
Introduction
Vernacular watercraft are disappearing from many parts of the world (McGrail, 2001:201, 211; Blue, 2003:334; Pham et al., 2010:274), under pressure from a variety of forces often related to modernization. As vernacular boats represent living parts of the -
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Blog postWhile investigating logboats in the Rio Napo drainage in Ecuador in June, I observed six log rafts within a few kilometers of each other – and no others elsewhere in the same drainage. I do not know if this clustering of rafts was particular to a limited area or if further investigation would reveal more widespread usage.
According to my guide and one other informant – a woman on a raft with her children on the Rio Arajuno, a tributary of the Napo -
Blog postIn June, I went searching for logboats along a portion of the drainage of the Rio Napo in el Oriente -- that part of Ecuador that lies to the east of the Andes Mountains. The Napo and all other rivers here drain ultimately into the Amazon.
Fernando Vargas-Tapuy, Kichwa farmer and canoe builder, at the base of a chunchu tree. (Click any image to enlarge.)On my first day in the forest, accompanied by a guide/translator and a driver, I explored the Rio Jatunyaco, a tributary of -
Blog postWatercraft played central roles in the economic, social, and spiritual lives of Ecuador’s prehispanic coastal cultures. Referring to the period of the region’s first civilizations, from 2000 to 200 BCE, Karen Olsen Bruhns states that “Transportation on the coast was … almost entirely by boat, and canoe models are common in the art of the region.”
Artifacts on display at the newly renovated National Museum of Ecuador in Quito demonstrate the importance of watercraft to Ecuador’s prehispani -
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Blog postFollowing a two-year closure caused by money problems and the need for extensive renovation, the National Museum of Ecuador at La Casa de Cultura in Quito reopened last Saturday. The essentially new museum is attractive, sophisticated, and free.
In the current fashion of most museums, this one takes pains to tell stories. Artifacts are displayed in service of narratives constructed by the curators (and, one suspects, by the museum's board of directors and management). This means tha -
Blog postIn the prior post we examined the watercraft of the Madan or Marsh Arabs. Now we'll look at how the Madan used those boats -- particularly the plank-built ones. As in the last post, all the photos and essentially all the content are from The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger.
Almost all of the economic activities of the Madan depended upon their boats. The most important were raising buffaloes, fishing, wildfowling, reed cutting, mat-making, and smuggling. Others included raising sheep and g -
Blog postThe Madan, or Marsh Arabs of Iraq, depended heavily upon their boats, including canoes like this one under construction. Note the heavy, closely-spaced, roughly-formed frames, inner planking at the tops of the frames, and heavy thwarts. (Click any image to enlarge.)Wilfred Thesiger was an upper-class Englishman, born the son of a diplomat in Addis Ababa in 1910 and educated in England at the best schools. After conducting expeditions and serving in the diplomatic service himself in Africa, he se
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Blog postAfter Ken Preston saw my previous post about Vietnamese basket boats, which included one of his photos from his website Boats and Rice, he contacted me about another interesting and beautiful Vietnamese boat he was privileged to sail on recently.
Newly launched traditional fishing boat, Quang Yen, Vietnam. Photo: Ken Preston. Rights reserved/used by permission. (Click to enlarge.)This type of sailing fishing boat from northern Vietnam went out of use some decades ago with the proliferation -
Blog postWe've written before about woven or basket boats in Vietnam (see, for example, this post highlighting a canoe-form craft, and this one about coracles), but the one in the image below, from James Hornell's Water Transport: Origins and Early Evolution, so struck us by its graceful form that we thought it was worth sharing.Woven boat of the Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam. From Hornell, Water Transport. (click to enlarge)The boat is common on the Gulf of Tonkin. We'll quote Hornell's comments in almos
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Blog postThe Inca are certainly the best-known pre-European culture of Ecuador, but they were hardly the only one. In fact, they were latecomers on the scene, invading from Peru less than one hundred years before Francisco Pizzaro arrived from Spain to destroy their civilization. Prior to the Inca's arrival, the land that is present-day Ecuador had been occupied by a succession of regional cultures, several of which used small watercraft.
Dugout canoes played an important enough role in some -
Blog postContinuing our series on boats and related artifacts that we observed recently at museums in Ecuador, we'll look now at a examples from a very fine exhibit of the country's diverse cultures at the Museo Pumapungo in the lovely city of Cuenca. (For the first post in this series, see this article about an Amazonian logboat.)
The first item, the canoe that follows, was built by cholo pescadores -- literally "mixed-race fishermen" -- on the Pacific coast. Like many Ecu -
Blog postOn a recent visit to Ecuador, we did not have an opportunity to observe any boats in the field, but we did manage to visit museums in Quito, Cuenca, and Guayaquil that had items of interest on exhibit. These included miniatures of dugout canoes and canoeists, and boat-related artifacts, from a number of precolumbian societies, as well as a couple of contemporary canoes, related implements, and models. We'll organize them in more than one blog post according the museums in which they ap
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Blog postFlying proas of the Caroline Islands, from Adm. Paris. (click any image to enlarge)In 1983 and 1984, Steve Thomas, who would later host the television series This Old House, lived intermittently on the tiny atoll of Satawal in the central Caroline Islands, an experience he documented in the book The Last Navigator: A Young Man, An Ancient Mariner, The Secrets of the Sea. While there, he lived with and studied under Mau Piailug, a master of the traditional Micronesian art and science of navigatio
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Blog postIn our previous post, we looked at details of outrigger design and construction in the Filipino outrigger boats known as bangkas. Here we'll look at other design and construction details in additional images from Michael Williams of Flatwolf Photography, to whom we express our thanks. (Click any image to enlarge.)
Bangkas were originally built as dugout canoes, then as extended dugouts (i.e., with strakes added atop the dugout base to increase freeboard). As shown in thi -
Blog postThe bangka -- also known as banca and paraw -- is a double-outrigger boat ubiquitous in the Philippines. According to one online dictionary of Tagalog (an Austronesian language, one of the more commonly spoken languages of the Philippines), the word bangka simply means "boat," and this appears to be accurate and logical, given the great diversity in bangka configurations.
Indeed, there seem to be only two or three common features of bangkas: their main hulls -
Blog postIn Fishing in Many Waters, James Hornell describes the practice of bonito fishing in the Maldives, including a description of the boats used. Although he doesn’t name the boat type, it can be termed a dhoni. (Somewhat like dhow, dhoni is a generic term that doesn’t indicate a single type of boat. According to Wikipedia, it means simply “small boat” in Tamil and related languages, while thoni is the equivalent term in Malayalam. We’ve written previously about the very different yathra dhoni of Sr
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Blog postCatamarans, of the type used on the Coromandel Coast in India’s southeast and in Sri Lanka, close by across the Palk Strait, are subject to two kinds of misconceptions. The first is one of terminology. In its original meaning, kattu-maram (Tamil for “tied logs”) denoted a raft, not a vessel with two identical hulls, as the term is commonly understood. The erroneous transference of the term was probably made by an early European traveler who, being familiar with Indian catamarans, decided to call
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Blog postTao tatara boats, with and without culturally significant decorations. (source) Click any image to enlarge.Orchid Island, also known as Lanyu, is about 45 miles due east of the southernmost point of Taiwan. Only 7.5 miles long, it is home to a culture best known as the Yami, although the people themselves prefer the name Tao, which means simply “people” in their language. Numbering about 4,000, the Tao, a Malayo-Polynesian people, make up about two thirds of the island’s population, the remainde
