Introduction

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Pages 9-10

The history of the ship begins gins naturally many thousands of years before the first  known representation.
The erliest pictures are of course primitive, but they by no means show us boats in their most primitive form.
They are types which we still can find today in various corners of the world.

The first boat is often shown as a floating log with a naked passenger, but it is certain that other animals were forced to take similar trips when rivers flooded and bore away bushes and trees long before the first being we really can call man walked the earth and navigated its waters.
There is reason to believe that the first travel made by water began in like circumstances and often ended unhappily.

When man of his own free will first set out on the waters, chose and perhaps trimmed a suitable tree trunk, collected a bundle of rushes or bound branches to form a raft for the purpose, only then may we say that the first boat was made.
It can have been a hundred thousand years ago, it can have been five hundred thou­sand.

Perhaps the discovery never spread beyond the tribe.
Perhaps it took a thousand or a hundred thousand years before another man in another part of the world made the same discovery.
To this day the Budumas break branches from the ambatche tree, bind them together to form a little raft and paddle with hands and feet across the bays of Lake Chad in Africa.

Pages 11-12

Most of the primitive vessels that can have existed in prehistoric times are still to be found in use today in various parts of the world. Some were to develop and improve, others were as mature as they ever would be, lacking any possibility of development. On the White Nile people pole and paddle themselves along on a boat-like raft of ambatche branches lashed together (2), and as the raft is alas called ambatche it may be presumed that the raft has given its name to the tree in the same way as the balsa of South America has given its name to the tree. The boat-like papyrus raft (3) which is used both on the White Nile and other African waterways has retained its appearance through the thousands of years we can folow its history.

The art of building such a raft has never died as papyrus is an extremely unsubstantial material to build boats with, the life of the raft thus never being more than a few months.

The catamaran proper (4), found on the Coromandel Coast of India consists of three or five logs bound together, the longest in the centre rising in the forepart of the raft like a prow.
It has little or no connection with the popular double canoe of today which sails under false denomination.

In the Fiji Islands there is a long, buoyant bamboo raft (5) which consists of two layers of bamboo poles and is fitted with a railing. This is no sea-going craft and is normally only used for transport on lagoons and between nearby islands. A relief from Nineveh of about 700 B.C. shows how men cross the Tigris swimming on inflated animal skins. The same method is still practised today in Tibet where the nomads carry the stitched and caulked skins of oxen and swine which are inflated to make buoyant boats (6) should their passage be hindered by water.

The dug-out, hollowed out of the trunk of the tree, was still in use at the beginning of this century in remote districts of Scandinavia, and the natives of Africa, South America and Australia continue to hollow out large tree trunks with the aid of stone implements and fire (7).

I believe it is very possible that the dug­out and the constructed hide boat together showed the way to all advanced shipbuilding. The primitive hide boat with skins stretched over wooden ribs is still to be found in Tibet as an alternative to the inflated bladder boat, in Greenland where it is called umiak, and in Britain where it is called coracle (8). It is used when fishing on rivers and lakes.

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Landström, Björn: The Ship : An Illustrated History. Illustrated by .Björn Landström. Translated by Michael Phillips.  Doubleday and Company, Garden City, New York, 1961

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