ABSTRACT
BOAT-BUILDING. […] For up-stream above the rapids there are used only ra s, made of bamboos each some thirty feet long, lashed with rattan, cut o and xed square in front and of tapering unequal length behind. Two or three layers of bamboo will be lashed one above the other for heavier burdens or for greater comfort; the even front ends pierced athwart and fastened together by one long wooden peg. Atop and amidship in the better-made ra s will be a platform raised a foot high on shorter lengths of bamboo and protected by a palm-leaf covering. Polers standing in front and astern manipulate long bamboo poles, and paddlers squat in front. In smooth reaches progress is slow; in rapids, however di cult, it is fairly safe – even without o ering and invocation that the ra smen make to the spirit whose narrow rock-bound home of troubled waters is to be invaded, calling upon him to open its maze “like the palm-blossom a-slip from its sheath, like the snake that / unwindeth its coils.” Below the rapids, the ra will be sold to folk who have to go far a-forest for bamboo or who welcome a ready-made oating bath-house. For in the smooth lower reaches the ra is supplanted by the dug-out. /
Folk-tales give us many glimpses of the dangers and di culties that beset the Malay boat-builder with his primitive beliefs and his primitive tools; how he has to go for days up hill and down dale in search of a tree trunk large enough; how, when at last he discovers some huge father of the forest whose foliage “sweeps the clouds above and the earth below,” it is found to be inhabited by hostile jins that before felling can proceed have to be expelled with sprinkling of rice-water, smoke of incense and the assistance of jins in the service of the magician. […]
/ Anyhow, when a trunk of hard wood of the required length of the boat but much less in diameter than the intended width has been obtained, it is hollowed by means of re, roughly shaped and planed with an adze. e hull may then be le to soak in water. Presently ember res are lit along and underneath
its sides and into the hollowed centre is poured water, which gradually swells the inside while the re contracts the outside, till the width is increased and the sides expand to admit thwarts being placed under projecting ledges (cut along the inside just below the gunwale), so as to prevent the contraction consequent on drying. Sometimes this opening process is further helped by the lashing of timbers transversely below and above the hull, fastening their ends together with rattan and then straining them to serve the purpose of a press by leverage of wooden handles put into the rattan lashing: sometimes the whole business from the very beginning is done with adze alone, the builder considering that the drying of the sap by re shortens the boat’s life: sometimes two boats may be “dug out” of one large trunk, a small within a large, wedges being driven in to e ect the separation. “All vessels of the dug-out class,” Pitt-Rivers1 observes in his essay on Early Modes of Navigation, “are necessarily long and narrow and very liable to upset; the width being limited by the size of the tree, extension can only be given them by increasing their length. In order to give greater height and width to these boats, planks are sometimes added at the sides and stitched on the body of the canoe by means of strings or cords, composed frequently of the bark or leaves of the tree of which the body is made. /
In proportion as these laced-on gunwales were found to answer the purpose of increasing the stability of the vessel, their number was increased; two such planks were added instead of one, and as the joint between the planks was by this means brought beneath the water-line, means were taken to caulk the seams with leaves, pitch, resin and other substances. Gradually the number of side planks increased and the solid hull diminished, until ultimately it dwindled into a bottom-board or keel at the bottom of the boat, serving as a centre-piece on which the sides of the vessel were built. Still she was without ribs or frame-work; ledges on the sides were carved out of the solid substance of each plank by means of which they were fastened to the ledges of the adjoining plank and the two contiguous ledges served as ribs to strengthen the boat; nally a frame-work of vertical ribs was added to the interior and fastened to the planks by cords. Ultimately the stitching was replaced by wooden pins and the side planks pinned to each other and to the ribs; and these wooden pins in their turn were supplanted by iron nails.”
