McGrail - Early Ships and Seafaring: Water Transport within Europe

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
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Copyright Sen McGrail, 2014
Copyright of the illustrations belongs to the author,
except where stated otherwise.

ISBN: 978 1 78159 392 9
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Contents

Preface

T wo-thirds of the worlds surface is covered by sea; the other third has numerous lakes and rivers which were pre-eminently early Mans highways. Since the Stone Age, water transport on lake, river and sea has been the prime means by which Man explored and exploited the world, linked together its dispersed populations, and sustained trade and exchange. The raft and the boat (later the ship) remained principle actors in that role until the advent of the aeroplane in the early twentieth century.

Boats are their own advertisement: there therefore has been a tendency for styles of boat building and methods of propulsion and steering to spread around centres of innovation and become regional styles. The aim of this volume is to present what is now known about the water transport of two of those regions: the Mediterranean and the European Atlantic seaboard. The time span of the text extends from earliest days to the fifteenth century AD when European ships had begun to be designed in a formal way, and technical descriptions and drawings of water transport were produced.

A significant change in water transport occurred with the introduction of the ship with all that increase in size implies for operational capabilities. In the English language, there is no clear dividing line between the two, merely a range of characteristics of which the ship, generally speaking, has more than the planked boat. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the boat as a small open vessel; the ship as a large seagoing vessel. A distinction is thereby drawn between, on the one hand, a small, un-decked vessel (the boat) limited in range and by the weather, and using informal landing places; and, on the other hand, a large, decked vessel (the planked ship), capable of carrying a boat onboard, relatively unrestricted in range or by the weather, and often operated from formal harbours with wharfs and jetties.

Large vessels that might well be called ships seem to have been built in certain regions of the world after Iron Age technology (a necessary, but not sufficient condition) was acquired. Nevertheless, vessels of the medieval Nordic (Viking) tradition that were sailed across the north Atlantic Ocean and might therefore, be considered ships were, structurally, open boats. Clearly there are nomenclature problems. In the chapters that follow I have attempted to distinguish between boats and ships but may not always have succeeded.

In earlier times (and still today, in places around the world) rafts and boats built of bark, logs, bundles and hides were not only relatively quickly built, but also matched both the role they were destined to undertake and the environment in which they were to be used. In the long run, however, it proved to be only the plank boat that could be increased in size to become the ship capable of sailing the oceans of the world.

In and Five of my Boats of the World (2001, Oxford University Press). Those descriptions are followed by an exposition of the regions main traditions of float, raft and boat/ship building. The third element in each chapter is a description of how such water transport was used: propulsion, steering, navigation and the like, including (where the information is available) the identification of early harbours and landing places.

As the reader will find, there are great gaps in our knowledge, especially in the early times when reliance has to be placed almost entirely on excavated evidence, which is not only sparse but also incomplete. Moreover, on excavation, such remains are seldom found to be arranged in an orderly and readily-understood fashion, which may sometimes lead to doubt and disagreement about how they should be interpreted. Nevertheless, it is generally agreed that, for certain times and places for example, the Eastern Mediterranean in the Classical and Byzantine periods, and in tenth to twelfth century AD Scandinavia a reasonably coherent, moderately comprehensive, and probably fairly accurate picture can be presented. For other times and places, as orderly an account as possible has been given.

Chilmark
Feast of St Thomas Aquinas
2014

CHAPTER 1

Concepts and Techniques

I n 1946, James Hornell, marine biologist by profession but nautical ethnographer-historian by inclination, published Water Transport, a remarkable volume that summarised his wide-ranging almost worldwide knowledge of working rafts and boats. In his preface, Hornell defined water transport as the many devices upon which men, living in varying stages of culture, launch themselves afloat upon river, lake and sea Hornells many devices may be divided into four classes: floats, rafts, boats and ships. For reasons of brevity, the term ship is used in the title of this book. Nevertheless, for our purposes here, ships may be thought of as large boats; the three other classes may be distinguished, one from another, by considering how the buoyancy of each is derived or applied.

Floats are personal aids to flotation: a floats buoyancy is applied direct to the man partly immersed in the water. Outside tropical waters, the seagoing use of floats is constrained by water temperature and limited by the endurance of the user.

Rafts derive their buoyancy from the flotation characteristics of each individual element which must have a specific density less than 1 (i.e. it must float). Some rafts are boat shaped, nevertheless they are flow-through structures and are therefore not boats. Like floats, rafts are used on rivers and lakes but their flow-through characteristic means that, outside the zones of warmer water (approximately 40N to 40S) their use at sea is limited and is, indeed, impossible when cold air and sea temperatures are combined with exposure to wind and/or rain to the point where the crew are disabled by hypothermia.

Boats derive their buoyancy from the flotation characteristics of a hollowed vessel as water is displaced by its watertight hull. There are no limitations on the specific density of hull materials, although those made of lighter materials will float higher in the water and therefore be able to carry greater loads.