Water Transportation

After walking, but only barely, and before the horse, there were the rivers and streams.  And the oceans.

And they were the highways.

Recently, I posted a thread on equine transportation.  Sometimes it will be claimed that, before the train, nothing moved faster than the horse. That is very true, but with qualifiers.  Horses can cross streams, and they can swim too, but they're limited in these regards. Beyond that, even with a horse, the rider is working more than non riders suppose.  Indeed, riding a horse, particularly riding a horse the way working riders ride them, is pretty good exercise.  One old infantry general of the 20th Century noted that cavalry officers outlived infantry officers, which he attributed to their constant riding.

And of course one horse can only carry so much.

But water is different.  One boat, even one canoe, can carry quite a bit, and for efficient transportation, water courses are hard to beat, as long as the water goes where you also want to go.

In our paved and engineered world of today, water transportation isn't really appreciated.  People who want to go from North Platte Nebraska to St. Louis would not think of trying that by canoe, and people who wanted to go from St. Louis to the Pacific would look at the Interstate Highway routes, not the watercourses.  But that wasn't always so.

I'll confess that, unlike walking, which I like to do, and unlike horses, which I like, I'm not a huge fan of watercraft, and for that reason, even though I know that rivers were the highways of antiquity, this is a historical topic I'm not really that familiar with, or even interested in.  But the purpose of this blog is to explore the past as it really was, not as we'd have it, and therefore this matters in this context.  And, while the only boat I own is a canoe, and that's the only boat I want to own, perhaps this is more interesting that I figure it is.  So let's take a look.

The boats of antiquity were undoubtedly canoes or boats that we can regard as canoes. Crude compared to the Old Town canoe that you would look at over at the sporting goods store, their efficiency and utility is demonstrated by the fact that they're still with us, and like the horse, even though most of us don't require them for the outback, a lot of us like them.  I like mine for that matter.

Canoes are fun, and apparently the temptation to take a photograph from one has been around for a long time.

Canoes have existed pretty much in every culture, everywhere.  Whether they were burnt out or dug out logs, or manufactured with hide and frame, the canoe is basically boat 1.0, and it's hard to replace.  Whether made of wood, fiberglass, or aluminum, the basic canoe is still pretty much the basic canoe.  And that applies to what are basically canoes 2.0, the kayak, as well.

Canoes in antiquity served to move people over long distances.  Whole tribes of people moved hundreds of miles on rivers via canoes, and really bold folks took ocean going varieties distances that would scare most of us, for good reason.  In our country, the canoe was the basic vehicle of the fur market for a long time.  Indian tribes had them and used them, and so did fur trappers.  It's popular to imagine the trapper riding from St. Louis, or Quebec, to the Rocky Mountains, but they didn't do that.  They rowed upstream, hard work, but efficient, and traded for horses when they got where they were going.  When they turned around to go the other direction, they traded the horse away and floated downstream.

 

 Outrigger canoe on Maui, the early variants of which took the Polynesians clean across the Pacific.

As technology improved, boats did too of course, and all manners of boats were developed over time.  It was a long time before rivers ceased to be highways.  In Medieval England the rivers were the highways, and while the well to do had horses, they were very limited by the vast quantity of water that Great Britain features. To really get somewhere, for a long time, you took the boat.  Chances are that you leased a boat from somebody whose occupation that was. The water taxi, has a long origin.

And if you were taking goods to market, you probably took them by boat, at least if they were substantial in quantity.  Packing goods in no doubt occurred, but floating them in is easier.  And so it was in our own country for much of its history.  River ports were very important means of transporting every manner of goods, and to some extent, on truly major rivers, they still are.

But not like they once were.  Consider that in 1876, when the Army engaged in its famous summer (stretching into fall) campaign on the Northern Plains, part of the Army went by boat.  We don't think of it that way, but the River boat The Far West went all the way up the Yellowstone River.  It was, indeed, a specially designed shallow bottom river boat made for traveling the shallow rivers of the west, with a gin pole that allowed it to muscle its way past or over shallow shoals.  Cavalrymen charging into the Little Big Horn valley that summer were attired in part in straw boaters, brought upstream and sold by a trader on the Yellowstone.  Nothing plies the Yellowstone commercially today.

And so efficient was inland travel by water that artificial watercourses were created everywhere. They were the highways of their day.  Interior canals for transportation were created right up to the railroad days in Europe, when the railroads suddenly made them obsolete.  In this US, this was done to some extent as well, with some still in use.  The most famous of all American canals, and one of the most important in our history, amazingly remains in use, having been enlarged and improved over, time.  That canal inspired a song that remains in The American Songbook.

The Erie Canal crossing the Genosee River, by bridge.  1900.

I've got an old mule and her name is Sal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
She's a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Albany to Buffalo

Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

We'd better look 'round for a job old gal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
'Cause you bet your life I'd never part with Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
Git up there mule, here comes a lock
We'll make Rome 'bout six o'clock
One more trip and back we'll go
Right back home to Buffalo

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

Oh, where would I be if I lost my pal?
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
Oh, I'd like to see a mule as good as Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
A friend of mine once got her sore
Now he's got a busted jaw,
'Cause she let fly with her iron toe,
And kicked him in to Buffalo.

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

Don't have to call when I want my Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
She trots from her stall like a good old gal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
I eat my meals with Sal each day
I eat beef and she eats hay
And she ain't so slow if you want to know
She put the "Buff" in Buffalo

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

This all deals, of course, with interior transport, where waterways were once incredibly important.  They still are, of course, and barges and even ships still run everyday on the nation's most significant rivers.  But this hasn't dealt with external transport, i.e., ocean going ships.

Ocean going ships remain the most important factor, rather obviously, in international trade.  Anything of any significance, except people, tends to nearly always go by ship if it has any size to it at all.  Prior to transoceanic air travel, everything in international commerce went by ship, including people.  The importance of the oceans to commerce has been so vast that it's formed a primary focus of international law and national diplomacy.  Being a seafaring nation, whether we think of ourselves that way or not, we've been in the forefront of keeping sea lanes open from day one.  We may like to think that we stayed out of other countries affairs up until World War Two forced us on t the international stage, but this isn't so.  We went to war when the country was in its infancy against local forces out of Algiers over the issue of freedom of the seas.  We fought a naval small scale spat with the Japanese while we were fighting each other in the Civil War.  We indeed "opened" Japan, and as is being explored in the 1870 to 1918 blog we dabbled in Hawaiian affairs pretty darned early.  So, even as an infant nation, we plied the seas internationally and would fight over the right to do so when we felt we had a right to do so.  We did just that in World War One, when we were horrified by German unrestricted submarine warfare, the German decision that may have resulted in the loss of the war for the Germans, and the downfall of the German Empire.

Troop ship, World War One. This ship is an ocean liner, at one time the basic means, and in fact the only means, of getting across the Atlantic or Pacific.  Now, they're really a thing of the past, replaced by "cruise ships" which are similar, but which are taken in part for the experience itself.

The importance of the oceans to commerce, while still vast, didn't diminish at all until after World War Two, when for the very first time commercial air travel started up.  Moving at first people and mail, commercial air travel expanded into packages and even larger items, and now occupies the field in transporting people, who would rather endure a flight of hours rather than weeks or days.  Who could blame them?  But what's interesting about that, while it is a huge change, it also means that on the oceans, less has been changed by technology, no matter how advanced it may have become, than perhaps in other areas that we've discussed.  Certainly modern transportation has cut down on continental port to port shipping, but on the high seas, ships still dominate over anything else. 

The technology has certainly changed, and massively.  And quickly as well. Sailing vessels remained a viable commercial ship, with augmented coal fired steam engines, well into the 20th Century.  The largest of these ships ever built, the massive six masted schooner Wyoming, was launched in 1909, not even a century ago.  It tragically broke up in heavy seas in 1924.  As late as the 1940s some vessels of this type, although smaller, still sailed.

The Wyoming.

By that time, and indeed for quite some time prior, big ocean going steam powered ships had become common, so ships like the Wyoming and other fast clipper ships seem to be an anachronism, even if they were not. But the big ship era had really taken over, and had been a strong presence for quite some time by then.  For commercial shipping, they've grown even larger, with current commercial ships being unbelievably large.  As noted, they don't move very many people, however, and indeed a modern ocean going ship has a crew so small its almost unbelievable.  Oil tankers, for example, just have a handful of crewmen.  Only fighting ships and cruise ships have significant numbers of crewmen.

So, here we have the second oldest means of getting around still being one of the most important.  As an average person, you aren't too likely to take a boat somewhere because you need to, unless its a ferry to cross a river, or something of the kind.  But they're still hugely significant commercially, and as present as ever.  And like horses, our association with them is so strong, we still cling to them, naturally, for enjoyment.

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Related Threads.

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Riding Bicycles

Walking