ABSTRACT
Fortunately for posterity, the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent was the main setting for the work of James Hornell Up and down its coasts, over its inland waterways, he observed and recorded the extraordinary variety of primitive craft which until recently, and in some cases still, have survived there – the wooden blocks of the fishermen of the River Kaveri, the slightly more advanced pottery jars of their equivalents on the lower Indus, the ‘chatty’ rafts of Bengal, the inflated bullock skins of the Punjab, the rafts of Hardwar, in which a number of inflated skins were fastened together to make one craft, the coracles of the Tungabhadra and Kistna Rivers, the aloe-bundle floats of Kamalapuram, the reed rafts called bindi of the United Provinces, the log rafts or ‘catamarans’ of the east coast, the palm-tree dugouts of Bengal, and the fishing canoes of Tinnevelly, in which a washstrake and inserted U-frames make the first step towards converting a dug-out into a built ship. 1 For some of these categories, evidence such as the carvings on the western gateway of the Buddhist stupa at Sanchi show that log-floats, inflated skins and craft with sewn planks were in use specifically in the first millennium AD. 2 But there is little likelihood that use of most of these primitive types does not date back much further than this.
