DUGOUT TO KEEL

Evening Star, Issue 22031, 17 May 1935, Page 1

DUGOUT TO KEEL

P!U»SS OF SHIPBUILBIHG Not a single bona fide Roman vessel has been preserved. The vessels of Phoenicia and Greece are all of them gone. But we have come across several of _ the remnants of boats that were built in northern Europe only a very short time after the departure of the last of tho Roman legionaries from the Islands of the North Sea (writes Hendrick William yan Loon in his latest book). The earliest of these dug up somewhere in Lincolnshire in England in the year 1886, was of course nothing but a dugout, an old trunk of a tree about 20ft long and sft wide, and closed at the ends with boards. One can see bdhts like that this very day in the Pacific Ocean and on some of the smaller Swiss lakes, where they have survived since prehistoric times when those lakes were full of small villages built on piles at a safe distance from the. shore.

Shortly afterwards similar dugouts were found iu the marshes of .southern Denmark. Apparently therefore that type, of boat was used by all the people of northern Europe, though if they had been merely hollow trees, we could have dismissed them without further ado. But they showed an improvement which was of the' greatest importance when we try to find out by a process of constructive imagination just exactly when and iu what manner our ancestors got their first notions about shipbuilding. Dugouts, made.out of the trunk of a tree, are very difficult to handle, and they cannot begin to carry the loads that can he transported in the average Indian canoe. Unless a river or a lake he flat as a pancake, the dugout will ship water, and while it can’t exactly sink, neither will it bo of great practical value when, slightly submerged beneath the surface of an icy river.

To overcome this difficulty, those early shipbuilders began by fastening a row of planks all along tho sides of their hollow tree. In many instances they had added a second series of planks on top of the first. Tlie.se were fastened to the lower row by means of clamps and pieces of leather. AVhereupon, behold ! the dugout had become a fullfledged vessel. Gradually, as they grew more export at handling hammers and saws and other tools and gave up tlieir stone implements for tho infinitely better axes made out of bronze, they learned how to make wooden ribs which hold this rather complicated balustrade of planks together. And of course the higher the balustrade itself grew and the more cargo this new contraption could carry, the low-er the original dugout itself would sink below the surface of the water. Until that unfortunate tree trunk, which originally had been all there was to the ship, was finally reduced to the mere rank of a keel, and as a keel it survives until this very day, a keel 10ft or 20ft or 40ft below the surface of the water. The next time therefore you see a film of a largo shipyard where they are laying the keel for a new 70,000-ton liner, think of that long iron beam ns the direct descendant of one of those tree trunks of northern Europe which man used for a similar purpose at least a thousand years before Columbus proclaimed himself Admiral of the Oceans and bargained with the Palos magnates for the biro of their three little ships.

I purposely mention tho dcvelopnfent of “ from dugout to keel ” in connection with northern Europe, because there it was much easier to get trees big enough for this purpose than in the south. In the north, the forests came abruptly down to the shores of the sea, and it was comparatively easy to cut or burn down one or those trees

ahd push it into the water. That such dugout-keel boats must have been something of a novelty to the rest of-the world wo know from the fact that Ceos a r mentions them repeatedly in his dull little apology, which we know as his ' Commentaries,’ and that afterwards in Spain, when forced to transport his armies across a difficult river, no pavo orders to build boats like those hp had seen used along the coast of the North Sea.