(Jord. P. 53; Cathay, P. 217.) "Stitched Vessels," Sir
B. Frere Writes, "Are Still Used.
I have seen them of 200 tons burden; but
they are being driven out by iron-fastened vessels, as iron gets cheaper,
except where (as on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts) the pliancy of a
stitched boat is useful in a surf.
Till the last few years, when steamers
have begun to take all the best horses, the Arab horses bound to Bombay
almost all came in the way Marco Polo describes." Some of them do still,
standing over a date cargo, and the result of this combination gives rise
to an extraordinary traffic in the Bombay bazaar. From what Colonel Pelly
tells me, the stitched build in the Gulf is now confined to
fishing-boats, and is disused for sea-going craft.
[Friar Odoric (Cathay, I. p. 57) mentioned these vessels: "In this
country men make use of a kind of vessel which they call Jase, which is
fastened only with stitching of twine. On one of these vessels I embarked,
and I could find no iron at all therein." Jase is for the Arabic
Djehaz. - H. C.]
The fish-oil used to rub the ships was whale-oil. The old Arab voyagers of
the 9th century describe the fishermen of Siraf in the Gulf as cutting up
the whale-blubber and drawing the oil from it, which was mixed with other
stuff, and used to rub the joints of ships' planking. (Reinaud, I. 146.)
Both Montecorvino and Polo, in this passage, specify one rudder, as if
it was a peculiarity of these ships worth noting. The fact is that, in the
Mediterranean at least, the double rudders of the ancients kept their
place to a great extent through the Middle Ages. A Marseilles MS. of the
13th century, quoted in Ducange, says: "A ship requires three rudders, two
in place, and one to spare." Another: "Every two-ruddered bark shall pay a
groat each voyage; every one-ruddered bark shall," etc. (See Due. under
Timonus and Temo.) Numerous proofs of the use of two rudders in the
13th century will be found in "Documenti inediti riguardanti le due
Crociate di S. Ludovico IX., Re di Francia, etc., da L. T. Belgrano,
Genova, 1859." Thus in a specification of ships to be built at Genoa for
the king (p. 7), each is to have "Timones duo, affaiticos, grossitudinis
palmorum viiii et dimidiae, longitudinis cubitorum xxiiii." Extracts given
by Capmany, regarding the equipment of galleys, show the same thing, for
he is probably mistaken in saying that one of the dos timones specified
was a spare one. Joinville (p. 205) gives incidental evidence of the same:
"Those Marseilles ships have each two rudders, with each a tiller (?
tison) attached to it in such an ingenious way that you can turn the
ship right or left as fast as you would turn a horse. So on the Friday the
king was sitting upon one of these tillers, when he called me and said to
me," etc.[4] Francesco da Barberino, a poet of the 13th century, in the
7th part of his Documenti d'Amore (printed at Rome in 1640), which
instructs the lover to whose lot it may fall to escort his lady on a
sea-voyage (instructions carried so far as to provide even for the case of
her death at sea!), alludes more than once to these plural rudders.
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