History of shipping: Learning to cruise

Bodo was fed up. He had walked miles up and down the river bank searching for a shallow place to cross over to where he could see a huge apricot tree absolutely laden down with ripe fruit but he couldn't find one. His mouth was watering, his stomach rumbling and he was determined to reach the apricot tree one way or another. Not knowing how to swim, he had tried walking through the river but gave up when the water reached his nose and he had a difficult time getting back to where he started from as his bear skin clothes were sodden and heavy and the current very strong but… somehow he was going to reach those apricots. His stomach rumbled louder as he sat on top of a huge boulder to think, watching in fascination as a huge tree trunk floated down the river towards him then bumped to a halt almost at his feet. 'Now' he thought 'If that tree trunk was longer I could push it around and walk over it to reach the other side of the river but… it's way too short but… it floats on top of the water which is more than I can do. Maybe it will help me get across.' Bodo jumped off the boulder and leapt excitedly on to the log which promptly rolled over dunking him in the river and he was just crawling out, spitting out water and weeds, when his cousin Kodo wandered into view. "Hey Bodo," he shouted. "Strange way to catch fish. You'll frighten them all to death which is maybe what you are trying to do. Ha ha!" "I'm fed up of eating fish, fed up of eating half-cooked dinosaurs Kodo. I am desperate to eat those apricots on the other side of the river but I can't get across. I saw this tree trunk floating along and thought I could use it to help me in some way but now I'm not sure how. Do you have any ideas?" Kodo said, "How about you sit astride the trunk and I push it out as far as I can go without drowning, then you crawl to end of the trunk and walk in the shallow water at the other side." "Could work…" said Bodo thoughtfully. "One problem though, you will still be on this side of the river so I won't have any way of getting back! Any more bright ideas?" "Well…" said Kodo scratching his head again as he hadn't washed his hair for a year or two. "If we both sit on it, one at each end, we could try pushing it across using long branches, you pushing on one side and me on the other so that the log stays straight." "Mmm…" Bodo replied. "Sounds like a good idea so let's give it a try." In this way Bodo and Kodo became the very first people to invent a way of crossing water without having to swim and, when their wives insisted on joining the fun, they advanced a little further by carving out seats in the log so that the ladies didn't get their feet wet and, in this way, the very first dug-out canoe was born. Working together, Bodo and Kodo soon had a thriving canoe making business and their tribe quickly became known as the best fishermen on the river and got huge orders for fresh fish from miles away which gave them a bit of a problem. The summer weather in their part of the ancient world tended to get so hot that fresh fish went rotten before they could deliver their catch to distant villages as pushing their canoe through the water was time consuming business. After worrying about the problem for a few weeks and trying out various speed-up ideas which didn't work, Bodo designed paddles out of tortoise shells tied to small branches and with him using one paddle on the left hand side of the canoe and Kodo using one on the right, they fairly picked up speed but, unfortunately, not quite enough as the fish was always rotten by the time they reached a very far away village inhabited by their mother's cousins twice removed. It was head scratching time again! At this point Bodo's wife Podo, made a suggestion. She had noticed how large leaves rustled in the breeze and sometimes even blew along with it. "If we could find a large enough leaf you could fasten it in the centre of the canoe so that the wind would speed you along," she observed. "But I don't know where we could find such a big leaf." Neither did anyone else at this point in history so Bodo and Kodo settled for making longer canoes with room for up to six strong men who could all paddle at the same time to reach their destination before the fish went rotten All went well in Bodo's inland community for a hundred years and more by which time it had developed a reputation for being both progressive and wealthy under the leadership of Bodo's great-great-great grandson Modo. Unfortunately, Modo had a bad habit of bragging about how well his canoe-making fishing community was doing and word of their wealth reached a war-like but poor tribe struggling to make ends meet at the other side of the huge forest. This tribe, led by Zodo, a descendent of Kodo decided to invade, drive Modo and his people away and take over the village and canoe-making business for themselves and, after a short battle, they managed and Modo's community had to start from scratch in a coastal region without any trees. Not having trees to make canoes from was a huge drawback but Modo's eldest son Fodo experimented by tying together huge bundles of reeds to make rafts that would easily float on the sea and his brother Lodo worked out how to make a kind of canoe from the reeds too. These rafts and canoes made from reeds were much lighter to use than wooden canoes and could be paddled or poled along very quickly indeed, but these two boys, Fodo and Lodo, wanted to go faster and further each day. It was around this time that one of their elders remembered the story of Podo and the leaf and, as woven fabric had been discovered by now, they came up with the idea of hoisting a sail to trap the wind and thus save them the hard work of paddling. By around 3,000BC reed boats and rafts were common sights in parts of the world that reeds grew in abundance, but forest people much preferred to stick with their wooden canoes while some other tribes had learnt how to make boats out of animal skins stretched over wooden or bamboo frames. Boat travel had become the in thing and everyone wanted to jump on board by coming up with bigger and better designs. The Egyptians proved to be ahead in the boat designing competition and by 2,500BC knew enough to construct sea-going vessels known as 'Byblos boats' out of cedar wood from Lebanon. The remains of one such boat was found by archaeologists next to a pyramid in Giza, made out of cedar planks. It is 44 metres long and six metres wide which was quite something in those days. Some 1500 years later in 1100BC the Phoenicians had taken over from the Egyptians as the greatest seafarers of the ancient world and the Romans and Greeks eventually took over from them in the Mediterranean area while Chinese shipbuilders constructed amazingly versatile ships and 'junks' in their part of the world and by 1100BC were even able to organise an entire navy with both war and commercial intentions. By Mediaeval times ships had developed towering forecastles and sterns which, by the Renaissance and the 'Age of Exploration' had expanded to include rigging and lots of sails like those of ships featured in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. By the 1800s ships changed again as their builders invented paddlewheel ships, then steamships and, in 1912, the first diesel-powered ship. Nuclear fuelled ships came into being in 1958 but were found to be too costly and too dangerous for regular use so were reserved for military and naval use as they still are, with the inclusion of nuclear submarines today. From Bodo and Kodo's invention of the dug-out canoe carrying one or two people, boats and ships have evolved to carry thousands of passengers at a time and luxury cruise ships are fully equipped with cinemas, ballrooms, swimming pools and even tennis courts which is a very long way from wanting to reach the other side of the river to pick apricots!