Hair tousled by a passing zephyr and steely gaze directed up at some off-camera altocumulus action, Michael Verney, as photographed for the dust jacket of his classic book, Complete Amateur Boat Building, appears to me to be every inch the avuncular sort of chap from whom the bungling amateur boat-builder ought to be seeking advice. Here, accessorised with pipe and turtleneck jumper, is quiet competence, dependability and affable common sense personified. In the unlikely event that Verney should ever be the subject of a biopic, the only man for the job would be Hugh Bonneville, of Downton Abbey fame.
Verney is a shoo-in. The other candidates are Eric McKee, John Leather and – the only American on the list – John Gardner. In addition to assembling their books, I will track down these gurus and pick their brains. All have written and published extensively on the subject, and all have done so apparently with a shared aim – to spread the gospel in the hope of reviving the dying skills of the traditional boatbuilder by encouraging amateurs to reinvigorate their mundane existence by taking up plane and saw. So who better for an amateur to hit up for tips and general guidance?
Blitzing Amazon, I soon have a pile of yellowing volumes on my desk, including Verney’s Complete Amateur Boat Building, Leather’s Clinker Boatbuilding and Gardner’s Building Classic Small Craft. Thanks to my serendipitous bookshop discovery in Aldeburgh my fledging library already boasts a copy of McKee’s Clenched Lap or Clinker. That he has subsequently been recommended to me as a leading expert seems like the best kind of omen.
My heart sinks a little as I skim through the books with varying degrees of incomprehension. All, supposedly, are aimed at the amateur, but clearly none is the idiot’s guide I so badly need. Nevertheless, I’m attracted to Gardner’s no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is style. Building a boat, he cautions, will not be easy. ‘It will take some pains, both in the figurative and the literal sense, for the creative process at levels of excellence is never easy, and often its demands are rigorous and its discipline is severe’. One is, he continues, ‘likely to come close to tears more than once before everything is shipshape and the job is finally and creditably done. But then that is life, and some travail would seem a nearly inevitable part of the accomplishment of any challenging and worthwhile aim.’
Good pep talk, John. I allow my eyes to skate over the section warning the reader of the need for ‘careful and precise workmanship and some familiarity with tools and materials’.
Verney’s book, according to a contemporary review in the Sunday Times, is ‘the best single investment’ an amateur boatbuilder can make. In fact, the paper advises, ‘don’t start any boat without it’. In his introduction, Verney declares the book is ‘intended to dispel the mystique which surrounds boatbuilding, and to instil confidence. Some do-it-yourself experience is an advantage, but anyone with common sense will rapidly acquire unexpected skills and is certain to create a boat of fine quality.’
In turn, Leather lets it be known that ‘the painstaking amateur can build a superior wooden boat if he makes the effort’, while McKee insists that the average reader, ‘if he is . . . able to use the more common hand tools . . . could confidently build a [clinker] boat for himself’.
I notice a worrying common theme. When they talk about amateurs, none of these men appears to have in mind someone who has never previously owned so much as a plane or a chisel. Regardless, these are clearly the sort of people to whom I should be turning for advice and encouragement. There is, however, one problem, as I discover when I start trying to track them down. All four are dead.
It’s the dates of the books that tip me off – well, that, and Michael Verney’s pipe. Verney’s first edition was published in 1948 – seventy years ago. Gardner’s hefty tome, complete with plans and instructions for forty-seven boats, came out in 1996 but was a collection of articles first published in the US magazines Maine Coast Fisherman and National Fisherman over a period of twenty-six years, beginning in 1951. McKee and Leather, published in 1972 and 1973, were no hotter off the press.
McKee, I discover, died in 1984, Gardner in 1995 and Leather in 2006. I have, at least, a geographical association with Leather, who lived in Wivenhoe. As for Verney, who appears to have left no trace of his existence in the digital age, I am able to list him only as missing, presumed dead. If still alive he would be over ninety-five years old and perhaps not that inclined to waste any time he might have left on me.
For a few days, this gloomy discovery takes the wind out of my sails. I’m trying to reconnect with a dying art and the news that four of its greatest exponents have sailed into the sunset leaves me feeling that the art in question has already sunk without trace, along with any hope I might have had of getting even the weakest of handles on it.
But then, as I struggle to make sense of the Nottage plans, I pick up Gardner’s book again. Packed with drawings, offset tables, photographs and detailed instructions, it’s infused with an infectious enthusiasm for the art of boatbuilding that gradually begins to restore my spirits, and my determination. This is Gardner on ‘planked lapstrake, or clinker, as it is also called’: ‘Because beginners do not understand this method of planking, or know what is required, they tend to approach lapstrake planking as a fearsome bugaboo.’ In fact, he insists, ‘it is quite simple and easy’.
Later, I would rue my faith in those few, optimistic words, but at a time when I was wallowing around in a sea of ignorance they had the desired effect of getting me back on course. The spirit of Gardner’s intention – the force of his will, almost, that someone like me, somewhere down the line, would be persuaded to at least try – lifts me. ‘The amateur,’ he reminds me, ‘has one immense advantage over the professional. His time is worth nothing, so he can be lavish in its expenditure.’
Not strictly true, of course. My time is worth all the articles I won’t be able to write while working on the boat. But I like the sentiment – and buried somewhere or other in Gardner’s book, as I will come to discover, can be found solutions to many of the puzzles I will face over the coming months.
Verney, with his talk of dream ships and unravelling mysteries, also seeks to dispel self-doubt, but in his case like a variety-show hypnotist convincing a volunteer from the audience that they are the King of Ruritania. Or a boatbuilder. Few amateur boatbuilding projects fail, he reassures the reader. ‘Once a start is made, you will find that each operation falls into place and the anticipated problems solve themselves.’
Again, in time I would come to doubt this. Perhaps the practical, hands-on abilities of modern man, as represented in a self-appointed sort of way by me, fall woefully short of those possessed by Verney’s generation. Perhaps our evolution from practical analogue competency to impractical digital incompetency, leaving once vital and widespread skills to wither to mere vestigial stumps, has rattled on at a pace that would have startled Charles Darwin.
But no matter. Urged from beyond the grave by my quartet of special advisers, I shall at least try. What does it matter that they are beyond personal consultation? Dead or alive, through their writings Verney, McKee, Leather and Gardner represent an unbroken and inspirational link to the past. It is in this context that I start to think of the four, with all due respect, as my League of Dead Experts. Much of what they’ve written is beyond my comprehension – at first, at least. But frequently when I hit a snag or find I’ve exhausted my limited stock of talent, somewhere in one of their books I will find the next handhold and be able to grope my way forward.
As I pore over their words and drawings, I become acutely aware that I am handling historic documents, manifestos issued in an attempt to stem the rising tide of cheap-and-easy glass fibre and mass production that was threatening to sweep away the last defenders of an ancient skill. All four wrote with optimism, with a belief that there would always be a place, no matter how niche, for the old skills. The fact that up to seventy years later their work remains virtually the last word on the subject suggests that optimism may have been ill-founded.
But
here they are, by my side in the shed, stacked on the workbench alongside the Nottage plans. Over the months ahead, Fabian will hear from me a lot, by email or, when more urgent, by phone. But as often as I bother him I will more frequently seek advice from my fabulous four, and they will seldom fail me.
On a hot June day in 1990, I stood at the edge of a dirt airstrip in the far south of Venezuela, baking, in the style generally approved for mad dogs and Englishmen, under the midday sun. I had come seeking the stirring solitude of wild, wide-open spaces, but there was something undeniably doleful about watching the twin-engine aircraft that had just dropped me off in the middle of nowhere dwindle to a dot in the clear blue sky.
Not that I was sad to be on terra firma. The grand finale of the bumpy one-and-a-half-hour flight south from Ciudad Bolívar had been a vertiginous, near-vertical descent, carried out by a co-pilot who gave every impression of learning on the job. There was no door between cockpit and cabin and it was only the sight of the pilot, casually reading a newspaper as we plummeted towards the ground, occasionally lowering it to monitor our progress, that gave me cause to hope that we might actually be landing, and not crashing.
Now I was alone with my rucksack, loaded with sufficient supplies (or so I hoped) to see me through the next week or two. In one hand I held a compass, in the other, a book, open at a crude map. Just how crude became clear only as I took in the surrounding tableau of massive, table-top mountains, or tepuis, rising almost sheer from the river-laced savannah, which somehow had managed utterly to elude my slapdash cartographer.
This was the Gran Sabana, spectacular home of the world’s tallest waterfall and inspiration for the 1912 novel The Lost World, in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, imagines a landscape so cut off from the outside world that it is still populated by dinosaurs. There was a tiny shred of truth in Conan Doyle’s fanciful tale of evolution put on hold. In 1927, scientists exploring the plateau at the top of Mount Roraima discovered a previously unknown species of mouse, which subsequently has only ever been found on other tepuis in the Gran Sabana. But, so far, no diplodocus.
I wasn’t looking for mice, or dinosaurs. I’d come in search of a tribe that, disdainful or ignorant of the borders imposed by European colonists, continued to roam over the wild and beautiful nexus of territory where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana interlock, like three pieces of a giant’s jigsaw puzzle.
The book I was carrying, which I’d picked up in a secondhand shop in Cambridge, England, had been written decades earlier by an American anthropologist who had spent months living with this small tribe. I was intrigued by the description of a society, still insulated from the corrupting influences of the modern world, in which every single member had complete mastery of the seven or so basic skills they needed to survive.
Sadly, I no longer have the book – along with many other things it was later stolen during a stop-start train journey from hell (actually a dizzying, 4,000m ascent from sea-level Arica in the far north of Chile to the thin air of the Altiplano and the Bolivian capital La Paz). But from memory those skills ranged from making wooden pots and growing the carbohydrate-rich vegetable manioc to building rain-proof grass huts and fashioning dugout canoes from tree trunks.
Travelling in South America for a year, planning to pay my way with regular despatches for the London Evening Standard’s now-defunct World Cities page, I wanted to see this tribe for myself, and so here I was, trekking across the Gran Sabana in what I hoped was roughly the right direction. Adventure, as someone must surely have once said, only truly begins when one is lost.
A day or two later I found them, or some of them at any rate, thanks not to my skill at navigation but to an orange windsock, visible across the flat savannah for miles around. There were no huts, only rather desirable and solid-looking cabanas in which the ‘traditional’ dried-grass thatching appeared to play only a cosmetic part. No one was fishing with bows and arrows or energetically converting tree trunks into dugout canoes. In place of the anthropologist’s once isolated society I found a modern settlement, with general store, restaurant, guest house and tourist office, complete with boat rental shop.
The man in the office offered to hire me a boat, fashioned not from wood but from glass fibre, in which to explore some of the local waterways. If I didn’t fancy paddling, he said, for a little extra I could have an outboard. Would I like a room for the night, and would I be eating at the restaurant this evening? My plan to camp and cook under the stars was appearing increasingly perverse. Instead of being serenaded to sleep by exotic birds and cicadas, it seemed more likely that my lullaby would be performed by petrol-powered generators.
Then I spotted the old dugout drawn up on the riverbank. This was more like it. This was doubtless the style in which the bonkers British explorer Percy Fawcett had travelled in his doomed search for the mythical lost city of ‘Z’ in the Brazilian rainforest in 1925. Could I have that instead?
Eventually, reluctantly, and after several warnings about how tricky I would find it, the man agreed. Tricky was an understatement. With me and my gear on board, the canoe’s freeboard was down to just a few inches and it was almost impossible to keep the thing above water – the slightest wobble or ripple and it was under. My gear was quickly drenched, as was I. Fear of aquatic wildlife ensured I quickly mastered the art of bailing out the canoe while floating alongside it in the drink – sliding it repeatedly from side to side, sloshing the water out of one end and then the other – and clambering back in before piquing the interest of any passing anaconda.
To the amusement of the small crowd of children who gathered to witness my discomfort, shouting what I chose to interpret as encouragement, I repeated the process perhaps half a dozen times until eventually I rounded a bend in the river and mercifully was lost from sight. Disenchanted, I collapsed exhausted on a sandbank and reconsidered the appeal of glass-fibre boats.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had just undergone the same dispiriting experience that may well have provoked ancient man into the first of a series of developments that would lead eventually to the invention of clinker boatbuilding.
In his influential 1976 book, Archaeology of the Boat, Basil Greenhill identifies what he called ‘the four roots of boatbuilding’. The first three were the raft boat (logs or reeds lashed together), the skin boat (animal hide or fabric stretched over a framework of wood or bone, as in the Irish curragh or the Inuit kayak) and the bark boat (a continuous cylinder of bark, stripped from a tree, and strengthened with a frame of lashed twigs). But it was the fourth root, the dugout, from which a long line of boat types, from the Sutton Hoo burial ship and the Viking longships to the hardy beach boats of East Anglia and – though more modestly, perhaps – Phoebe’s Swift, could claim descent.
The dugout, writes Greenhill, ‘was of much greater significance in the origins of boats than any of the first three’, and for a simple reason. The other three were technological dead ends, whereas the simplest, the hollowed-out log, was ‘susceptible to almost limitless development’.
No one knows exactly when or where the first log boats were made. Ancient examples have been unearthed in many countries – hundreds in England and Wales alone – and in some parts of the world they are still being made to this day. The oldest one found in Britain, and the largest, was discovered during dredging work in Poole Harbour in 1964. Carbon-dated to about 300 BC, the 32ft oak dugout can be seen in Poole Museum.
But the oldest example, which is also the oldest known boat of any kind found anywhere in the world, is the Pesse canoe, a dugout unearthed in a peat bog by a farmer in Holland in 1955 and carbon-dated to around 8000 BC. About 10ft long and 11/2ft wide, it was hewn from a solid log of Scots pine and still bears the marks of the flint axe with which it was created.
Universal the impulse to go canoeing may have been, but some long-forgotten prehistoric human, somewhere, must have had the idea first. Perhaps it was triggered by the sight of a
fallen riverside tree trunk, bobbing suggestively on the water. Maybe hunger played a part, too. If your dinner is grazing on the far side of an otherwise unbridgeable body of water, floating across on that fallen tree trunk to hunt and kill it is a more attractive option than starving to death.
It was most likely at this point that our prehistoric tyro boat-builder belatedly identified the all-important concept of what naval architects now refer to as transverse, or roll, stability. Chalk up one lost test pilot to experience and back to the drawing board.
Who knows how many times this process was repeated before someone came up with the bright idea of improving the stability of the log by hollowing it out? This simple but effective breakthrough meant that it would be possible to sit inside the prototype boat, instead of balancing precariously on top of it, thus lowering the centre of gravity and improving stability. As a bonus, there would also be room enough to bring along a fellow hunter and to transport that hard-won dinner back to the family hearth.
It would be thousands of years before the technology emerged that allowed this basic design to be improved upon. Hollowing out a log, as Greenhill notes, may be ‘a laborious and difficult process’, but with only primitive tools available ‘it was a great deal easier than producing planks and joining them together to make a watertight plank-built boat shape’.
But necessity is the mother of invention – and of tools and skills. After experiencing the initial thrill of being able to travel from A to B across reasonably calm rivers and lakes, doubtless our embryonic naval architect, or perhaps his first client, contemplated the alluring possibility of going further afield, perhaps via more challenging coastal waters. At this point they will have found themselves in the same predicament I experienced in the Gran Sabana – overloaded and in deep water.
How to Build a Boat Page 8