If, hypothetically, I was writing a story/novel set in a nation made up of small islands where people customarily crossed the ocean between the islands by boat, what sort of small sailboats would be believable? Basically, how to write about the boats used without sounding like a complete idiot, but not needing highly technical descriptions.
Some of the islands would be visible to each other, allowing people to simply sail towards the island (while correcting for currents and such) without sophisticated navigational skills. In other cases, clumps of islands would be out of sight over the horizon.
In some cases, the boats would be more or less ferrys, transporting people and perhaps a small amount of luggage/livestock between islands. In other cases, you’d have cargo ships. There might be a few single or two person privately owned boats that are general purpose.
I’m assuming lateen type sails and probably no more than one or two masts, not the sophisticated multi-masted and lavishly sailed ships like the 19th Century cutters and tall ships.
Indeed. Harbo and Samuelsen rowed across the Atlantic in a two-man boat, though they did have some navigational aids (a compass, sextant, and a copy of *The Nautical Almanac). Rowing between islands in a chain or large archipelago is certainly plausible.
Outrigger canoes, as phouka suggests, are also a reasonable option.
The Greeks circa 800 BC had galleys. I think the Greeks tried to not leave sight of land if possible, and tended to beach their boats each night. These craft had both oars and sails, but the sails were really an auxiliary to the oars most of the time.
The Vikings and other Norse sailors circa 900 AD had long-boats. These would typically have 10 oars to the side and a single sail. If the wind was fair they would use the sail; otherwise they would row. A fair wind means it blows toward their destination or at worst at about 90 degrees across it. They did sail over the horizon routinely, and had elaborate navigation methods that are now mostly lost.
I don’t think many maritime peoples routinely traveled long distances in one- or two-man boats, simply because they could not carry enough to make the voyage worth it.
The Maldives is an example of a “country” that needs lots of short distance travel between islands and also longer distance travel between atolls themselves.
They traditionally used what is known as a Dhoni, having, as you guessed, lateen sails, and later engines, but I don’t see why the couldn’t also be oar powered.
What kind of infrastructure are you assuming? Those 19th century tall ships that you’re avoiding were possible only because they had excellent harbors to dock in, and so could afford to have a very deep draft, which allows you to tack very tightly against the wind. Viking Longboats had very, very shallow drafts because they needed not to rip their keels out in sandbars in the shallow rivers that they frequently sailed up. Caravels and carracks, the sort of ships that European explorers used to discover the Americas and round the Cape of Good Hope were a bit of a compromise, with a draft somewhere in between. The history of sailing ships parallels the development of harbor technology pretty closely.
Consider the Dhow, a simple lateen-rigged sailing ship used to transport goods across the Indian Ocean for almost two thousand years. Just about every gram of pepper eaten and every bolt of silk worn in the Roman Empire for hundreds of years crossed the Indian Ocean on dhows manned by no more than thirty men, and many much smaller.
Well, your basic cheapo Sunfish-style small sailboat has a daggerboard, a flap that can be extended below the keel to provide a deeper keel for open-water sailing and can be quickly removed for reaching the shore. That’s not practical for large vessels, though.
In fact, historically there have been boats that could either be sailed or rowed depending on conditions.
Well, it’s my fantasy, I’ll declare there to be both!
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Sure, but keep in mind that between island visible to each other, you’re quite often dealing with wind-tunnels (i.e. areas where the wind only goes in one direction), and the challenge of crossing will be permanent undertows. Wind-powered will usually not be worth it. So if you do combined vessels, your people will probably just row across the shorter stretches, and save the sails for the longer trips.
The ancient British — mainly Welsh — used Coracles. Small one-man boats mainly for river-work, but which according to Wikipedia, crossed the English Channel in 1974 ( about 30 miles open sea ).
Related Irish Currachs — rather larger — definitely went to sea.
There are reports of such boats travelling from Ireland and the Scottish Isles as far as Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. I understand that they navigated in part by watching weather patterns and the flight of birds to see where land was likely to be.
First of all, I’d like to thank everyone for their replies, they have given me much food for thought.
So, among my new-found conclusions is that in small archipelagos island-to-island travel is usually accomplished by some variant of rowboat, either small or large, ranging from Irish coracles to giant outrigger canoes.
Traveling between archipelagos could also be via large rowing craft. In additon, rowing supplemented by sail (Vikings) could also be a viable choice.
Would it also be correct to say that a small sailboat (crew of 6 or less) sailing large distances (across the Atlantic or Pacific) is a phenomena mostly of the late 20th Century forward? And that that has as much to do with better navigation and communicatons than necessarily with the boats themselves?
It is true that small sailboats crossing the Atlantic or Pacific is mostly a 20th century thing. However, changing any of those qualifiers drastically shifts your answer.
As noted, small sailboats have been crossing the Indian Ocean for millenia; the spice, incense, and silk trades date back to the Roman Republic or even earlier. They weren’t coast-hugging green-water craft, either; they went smack through the middle of the ocean in the most direct routes available. Large sailing ships were crossing the Atlantic regularly in the 1500s and travelling clear from Japan to Europe in the 1600s. And small boats, mostly paddled or rowed, crossing nearly the entire Pacific Ocean with remarkable navigation was how the Polynesians settled and traded among the Pacific islands, including Easter Island and Hawaii. Viking longships were alternately paddled and sailed, depending on the wind conditions. They could travel downwind or across the wind pretty well under sail, but they couldn’t tack into the wind much because their draft was so shallow.
And while better navigation certainly does help, there just wasn’t much reason or safety in traveling in small sailing craft back then. It was damned dangerous to travel like that, and if you were doing it, you were doing it because there was a heck of a lot of profit in it. A small craft can’t carry much cargo to show a profit or many friends to loot your destination or protect you from pirates. Very small sailboats are mostly a pleasure thing, and it’s only in the last couple hundred years that many people have had that kind of leisure time.
It seems like there would be lots of very small boats like these used by fishermen, pearl divers, spearfishers, etc. The subsistence-level “peasants”, in other words.