As an angler in pursuit of fish across some 45 countries, I have travelled in a variety of precarious watercraft, from a Tahitian va’a to a coracle in Coorg, and remain convinced that all buoyant vessels are merely looking for somewhere to sink. In his study of the cultural history of small boats around the north Atlantic, David Gange, an academic historian and devotee of the kayak, argues that they are in fact transports of delight, and a key component in the survival of precious maritime communities.
Structured around eight trips he made over the course of two years, Afloat has to cover a lot of ground (and water) within a relatively narrow compass, and occasionally the compressed histories of these places – beginning in Connemara and culminating in Barbados – can make for some stiff reading. But once he allows us down to sea level, with evocative descriptions of his own paddled experience, then the book really gets under way.
Whether he is tracing the development of a Galway hooker or a Faroese tribekkur, his method is to visit these communities in situ, and rather than relying on archival histories (of which anyway there tend to be few) he studies the folklore, foodstuffs and boatbuilding traditions in order to reveal the ‘silent knowledge’ that continues to unite various peoples via their seacraft. There is an agreeable documentary fascination with the ingenious and adaptable techniques he catalogues. We learn of carvel construction, caulking, lapstrake, cowhide, sculling and sweeping (the unmechanised boats he describes are all designed for four rowers or fewer). We are introduced to concepts of flux and tension, and skills ranging from the collection of driftwood to developing an eye for perceiving a shape innate in standing timber. Materials still include antler pegs and fish vertebrae. In Maine, where canoe production has an impressively long history, the sign on one desk read: ‘If God wanted fibreglass boats, he would have made fibreglass trees.’
Another study is of local idiolects – ‘unique marine lexicons’ that survive even when small communities are whittled down by the forces of centralisation. For a start, there are all those boat names – hundreds in Maine alone, including peapods, yawls, gundalows and ketches. Gange has an admirably wide field of reference, alluding to Gaelic ‘oar songs’, the Greenlandic poem ‘Ijaajjajja’, Henry Thoreau and Elizabeth Bishop, plus the work of the Canadian Cree artist Kent Monkman, whose alter ego is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.
The frisson and challenges of paddling a small boat are the best things in this account, and although the intrepid author has close encounters with bull seals and mako sharks he plays down the physical hardships while conveying some of the spiritual invigoration he experiences and the brinkmanship required to explore often inhospitable coasts – ‘it feels, paradoxically, like you’re scarred by joy’. At the heart of the book is a solo voyage through the icescapes of Greenland, a country where the traditions of the native qajaq are being revived. For days on end Gange paddles a tiny inflatable through a vast fjord under the midnight sun (‘there was no true dark, but a world purpled’), amid slounging whales with pungent breath. ‘The creature by your side is 30,000 times the weight of the little boat you’re in.’
His chapter on the northern homelands of the Sami charts the irreversible process, repeated widely elsewhere, of peoples being displaced by successive administrations contemptuous of their apparently ‘outmoded’ ways. Anthropologists often overlook the maritime aspect of the nomadic Sami, who used to be able to improvise a boat in a matter of hours, and taught the Vikings much about coastal seafaring. Paddling a traditional wooden spisse (the name means ‘pointed’) up a Norwegian fjord, Gange celebrates not the remoteness but the enduring plenitude of this ancient culture, with its abundant fish, berries and even birch-sap schnapps. He also acknowledges their wonderfully complex way of naming places with songs (yoiks) that conjure up the numen and essence of the landscape. I once heard such singing on the wind during a ‘white night’ on the Kola peninsula, though there was no other human being for miles around.
Gange’s colourful finale is a circumnavigation of Barbados, where, in the village of Six Men’s, they still build the tiny ‘Moses boats’ that were once crucial for ferrying supplies through the surf to ocean-going vessels (including slave ships). He reminds us that worldwide there is a powerful tradition of female fisherfolk – here, the formidable ‘Ruby Rollock’ used to dominate the seafront market – and that a lot of coastal history is orally preserved. We are introduced to the work of the Bajan boatbuilder Kamau Brathwaite, who graphically describes the island’s treacherous eastern shoreline, ‘and the sea over there was a giant of iron, a rasta of water with rumbelling muscles and turrible hair’. One feels Miss Chief Eagle Testickle might like it.
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