Paper Boat Photo (?)
We recently received a photo which might be of a paper canoe! The source suggests it is a Waters or Crane boat. The photo is from archives at Crane Paper in Mass, so that much fits. We've spent a lot of time looking at this image and so far we're ready to say:
- It looks like it could be a paper boat, but there is no unique characteristic to say that with confidence. But then there's no reason to think it is not a paper boat. So lets rely on the source and say it is.
- It might be resting on a display stand or that thing under the boat could also be its keel. The hull roughly matches a hull seen in Waters' catalogs, without a keel, so I'm guessing it is on a cradle of some sort. Or.... it's a boat with a keel. (Darn! if we just had another view!)
- If that is electricity entering the factory(?) building, (top of left window), then the image has to have been taken no earlier than the mid-to-late 1800's, which is when electrification started to be common.
- The details in the imagery does not match any images of the Waters factory building in Lansingburgh. Hence it could be taken in Dalton or Westfield... or elsewhere in Troy, perhaps at the last factory site Waters occupied after 1898. (But I don't have imagery of that building).
If this IS a paper boat, it is the only photo of one that I am aware of. (I suspect there are rowing photographs that show paper boats as well, if one could recognize them as such).
John Taylor - Thames waterman, poet, and paper boater
Of course I think the world of paper boating began in 1867, but we need to acknowledge at least one precursor. A successful boater he was not, but at least he had the idea.
In 1619 (about three years after Shakespeare's death, to place it in time for the history challenged in our midst), John Taylor and a colleague began a short trip down the Thames in a paper boat. Taylor is known to the literary world as the "waterman poet". While working as a waterman, he began writing poetry and provided a great deal of his support by selling his work by subscription (i.e. paid for before written).
We know little of his craft, but that it was built of browne paper, (presumably a hemp paper), contained no wood or metal, and had eight bull bladders as additional flotation. Ever the social commentator, Taylor claims the eight bladders were inflated by: a usurer, a drunken bagpiper, a whore, a panderer, a cutpurse, an informer, a post-knight, and a lawyer, (apparently in search of a superior grade of inflation).
In 1960 a crew from the UK's channel 4 program "Time Team", attempted a recreation of Taylor's boat using giant sheets of hemp paper, lots of hemp twine, and copious amounts of varnish . They said they basically made a giant envelope of paper using rolls of paper as thwarts. They even followed Taylor's lead and used two dried fish tied to canes as oars/paddles.
Although Taylor did make 60 miles in three days, within a half hour he noted that the boat began to "rot" and the bladders came to good use.
"The waters rose higher by degrees.
In three miles going almost to our knees,
Our rotten bottome all to tatters fell.
And left our boat as bottomlesse as Hell.
And had not the bladders borne us stiffly up,
We there had tasted of deaths fatall cup"
This travel of John Taylor was immortalized in his poetic work "The Praise of Hempseed", (from which the above is quoted), a paean to the British paper industry as well as a description of his voyage.