The Ferriby Boats are three Bronze-Age British sewn plank-built boats, parts of which were discovered at North Ferriby in the East Riding of the English county of Yorkshire. Only a small number of boats of a similar period have been found in Britain and the Ferriby examples are the earliest known sewn-plank boats found in Europe, as well as the oldest known sewn-plank boats in the world outside of Egypt. [1]
Ferriby is on the edge of a major estuary into the North Sea, the Humber, so speculation has been made ever since their discovery about whether they went to sea and sailed to the Continent. There is plenty of evidence that there was cross-channel communication, [2] but it is not known what kind of boats actually sailed across. Keith Miller, a regional archaeologist told the BBC that Ferriby boats would have been used to cross the North Sea, [3] though by modern standards, such vessels as these are considered suitable only for sheltered waters. Nonetheless, the Ferriby Heritage Trust describe Ferriby Boat 3 as Europe's oldest known seacraft. [4]
The BBC television programme Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath Pt 2, broadcast on BBC Two in September 2014, describes the boat as seagoing and describes the tons of cargo it could have taken across the Channel. However, the Dover Museum consider that the Dover Bronze Age Boat is the oldest seagoing boat known, at only 1550 BC, as the lack of a rocker bottom and pointed prow on the Ferriby boats is deemed by some to have made them too unstable for sea crossings. [5] This is contested though: The Oakleaf reproduction of the Ferriby boats (pictured) was given a pointed bow and the Ferriby boats are described by the museum that houses them as having curved rocker bottoms, which qualifies them as similar to the later Dover boat in their seagoing abilities.
In 1937, the first boat, known as Ferriby Boat 1 (or F1), was discovered by Ted and Will Wright, on the shore of the Humber. [6] It was a boat bottom with one end almost complete. What remained was 5.7 feet (1.7 m) wide and over 43 feet (13.17 m) long, the planks mostly 3–4 inches (7.6–10.2 cm) thick. It was part of an oaken three-strake flat rockered-bottom boat which had been stitched together with yew withies, caulked with moss and capped with watertight oak laths. It has room for up to eighteen paddles and has been radiocarbon dated to between 1880 and 1680 BC. [7]
Sixty yards (54.9 m) upstream, Ted Wright found the end of a second boat-plank in 1940. [6] This has become known as Ferriby Boat 2 (or F2). It is a twin-planked centre-strake dated to between 1940 and 1720 BC.
In 1963, part of a third boat was discovered, again by Ted Wright, this time in the company of one of his sons, Roderick, and excavated adjoining Ferriby Boat 1. The remains consist of part of an outer bottom-strake and associated side-strake; many years later (in the late 1990s), scientists from Oxford were able to demonstrate that the third boat dated from as far back as 2030 BC, by the analysis of samples of the boat using accelerator mass spectrometry.
Ted Wright had formulated this theory much earlier, as set out in his book "The Ferriby Boats: Seacraft of the Bronze Age", published in 1990.
The original boats were excavated in 1946 and had to be cut up to be moved. They were housed in the Archaeological Gallery of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, but are now in the care of Hull Museums. Details concerning the boats can be found on an information board on Ferriby foreshore, on a public footpath that forms part of the Trans Pennine Trail.
Two different replicas have been made of the Ferriby Boats.
In 2002-2003, Edwin Gifford and his team that included Richard Darrah built and sailed a half-size reconstruction of a Ferriby boat in Southampton. [8] They have experimented with using a sail; although there is no evidence of a sail in the originals, they successfully rigged a square sail to Oakleaf. Oakleaf was then acquired by the Ferriby Heritage Trust in 2008, and it is now kept at Ferriby.
In 2012–13, the Morgawr, a full-scale fully functional reconstruction (replica) of the Ferriby 1 boat, was built at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall in Falmouth, as a collaborative effort between the National Maritime Museum and the University of Exeter. [9] Launched on 6 March 2013 into Falmouth Harbour, Morgawr was an experimental archaeology endeavour to learn about Bronze Age boat building techniques (replica bronze tools of the Age were used) and to test the nautical capabilities of the craft. On her maiden voyage, she was paddled by the volunteer builders. She was also crewed by a rowing club team, who tested her manoeuvrability and speed. [10]
In 2014, having been in the water for many months, she was lifted out for her condition to be inspected and studied. As of 2016, she is on land, on display next to the Maritime Museum.[ citation needed ]
In 1985 samples of the tree-rings of all three boats were examined. Measuring the ring-thicknesses needed to try and match other ring patterns proved difficult, partly because the boats were already treated. No actual dates were possible, but some information was obtained and the record of ring-thicknesses has been retained for future comparisons. The studies revealed that a pair of bottom strakes were split from the same trunk and that boats 1 and 2 may have been felled at the same time, despite the C14 estimates, which suggest otherwise. [11]
Maritime archaeology is a discipline within archaeology as a whole that specifically studies human interaction with the sea, lakes and rivers through the study of associated physical remains, be they vessels, shore-side facilities, port-related structures, cargoes, human remains and submerged landscapes. A specialty within maritime archaeology is nautical archaeology, which studies ship construction and use.
The keel is the bottom-most longitudinal structural element of a watercraft. On some sailboats, it may have a hydrodynamic and counterbalancing purpose as well. The laying of the keel is often the initial step in constructing a ship. In the British and American shipbuilding traditions, this event marks the beginning date of a ship's construction.
A cog is a type of ship that was used during the Middle Ages, mostly for trade and transport but also in war. It first appeared in the 10th century, and was widely used from around the 12th century onward. Cogs were clinker-built, generally of oak. Cogs were fitted with a single mast and a single square sail. They were used primarily for trade in north-west medieval Europe, especially by the Hanseatic League. Typical seagoing cogs were from 15 to 25 meters long, 5 to 8 meters wide, and were of 30–200 tons burthen. Cogs were rarely as large as 300 tons although a few were considerably larger, over 1,000 tons.
A sewn boat is a type of wooden boat which has its planks sewn, stitched, tied, or bound together with natural fibre rope tendons or flexible wood, such as roots and willow branches. Sewn boat construction techniques were used in many parts of the world prior to the development of metal fasteners, and continued to be used long after that time for small boats to reduce construction costs where metal fasteners were too expensive.
Clinker-built, also known as lapstrake-built, is a method of boat building in which the edges of longitudinal (lengthwise-running) hull planks overlap each other. Where necessary in larger craft, shorter hull planks can be joined end to end, creating a longer hull plank (strake).
Below are notable events in archaeology that occurred in 1940.
The year 1963 in archaeology involved some significant events.
North Ferriby is a village and civil parish in the Haltemprice area of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.
The birlinn or West Highland galley was a wooden vessel propelled by sail and oar, used extensively in the Hebrides and West Highlands of Scotland from the Middle Ages on. Variants of the name in English and Lowland Scots include "berlin" and "birling". The Gaelic term may derive from the Norse byrðingr, a type of cargo vessel. It has been suggested that a local design lineage might also be traceable to vessels similar to the Broighter-type boat, equipped with oars and a square sail, without the need to assume a specific Viking design influence. It is uncertain, however, whether the Broighter model represents a wooden vessel or a skin-covered boat of the currach type. The majority of scholars emphasise the Viking influence on the birlinn.
The Hjortspring boat is a vessel designed as a large canoe, from the Scandinavian Pre-Roman Iron Age. It was built circa 400–300 BC. The hull and remains were rediscovered and excavated in 1921–1922 from the bog of Hjortspring Mose on the island of Als in Sønderjylland, southern Denmark. The boat is the oldest find of a wooden plank ship in Scandinavia and it closely resembles the thousands of petroglyph images of Nordic Bronze Age ships found throughout Scandinavia. The vessel is a planked wooden boat of more than 19 metres length overall, 13.6 metres long inside, and 2 metres wide. The planking is joined by sewing, using a bevelled lap joint similar to clinker construction. Ten thwarts that could have served as seats, span the boat with room for two persons each; this suggests space for a crew of at least 20 who propelled the boat with paddles. The boat would have weighed an estimated 530 kilograms, making it easily portable by its crew.
The Dover Bronze Age boat is one of fewer than 20 Bronze Age boats so far found in Britain. It dates to 1575–1520 BC, which may make it one of the oldest substantially intact boat in the world – though much older ships exist, such as the Khufu ship from 2500 BC. The boat was made using oak planks sewn together with yew lashings. This technique has a long tradition of use in British prehistory; the oldest known examples are the narrower Ferriby boats from east Yorkshire. A 9.5m long section of the boat is on display at Dover Museum.
Ancient boat building methods can be categorized as one of hide, log, sewn, lashed-plank, clinker, shell-first, and frame-first. While the frame-first technique dominates the modern ship construction industry, the ancients relied primarily on the other techniques to build their watercraft. In many cases, these techniques were very labor-intensive or inefficient in their use of raw materials. Regardless of differences in ship construction techniques, the vessels of the ancient world, particularly those that plied the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the islands of Southeast Asia were seaworthy craft, capable of allowing people to engage in large-scale maritime trade.
A balangay, or barangay, is a type of lashed-lug boat built by joining planks edge-to-edge using pins, dowels, and fiber lashings. They are found throughout the Philippines and were used largely as trading ships up until the colonial era. The oldest known balangay are the eleven Butuan boats, which have been carbon-dated individually from 689 to 988 CE and were recovered from several sites in Butuan, Agusan del Norte. The Butuan boats are the single largest concentration of lashed-lug boat remains of the Austronesian boatbuilding traditions. They are found in association with large amounts of trade goods from East Asia, Southeast Asia, and as far as Persia, indicating they traded as far as the Middle East.
Jewel of Muscat is a ship based on the design of the Belitung shipwreck, an Arabian dhow that was found off the coast of Belitung Island, Indonesia, in 1998 and subsequently salvaged. It was built in a joint effort by the governments of Oman and Singapore and Mike Flecker, one of the people employed by the salvage company Seabed Explorations at the time of the original recovery.
The Hanson Log Boat was a Bronze Age dugout boat found in a gravel pit in Shardlow in Derbyshire. The log boat is now in Derby Museum and Art Gallery.
The Hull and East Riding Museum of Archaeology is located in the Museums Quarter of the Old Town in Kingston upon Hull, England. It dates back to 1925 as the Museum of Commerce and Industry in a former Customs House but acquired its present name in 1989 with a major refurbishment and new entrance, with the transport section moving to a separate museum. It displays items from prehistoric to medieval in the area, many of them in life-size tableaux or reconstructions of rooms and buildings.
Lashed-lug boats are ancient boat-building techniques of the Austronesian peoples. It is characterized by the use of raised lugs on the inner face of hull planks. These lugs have holes drilled in them so that other hull components such as ribs, thwarts or other structural components can be tied to them with natural fiber ropes. This allows a structure to be put together without any metal fastenings. The planks are further stitched together edge-to-edge by sewing or using dowels ("treenails") unto a dugout keel and the solid carved wood pieces that form the caps for the prow and stern. Characteristically, the shell of the boat is created first, prior to being lashed unto ribs. The seams between planks are also sealed with absorbent tapa bark and fiber that expands when wet or caulked with resin-based preparations.
A Phoenician joint is a locked mortise and tenon wood joinery technique used in shipbuilding to fasten watercraft hulls. The locked mortise and tenon technique consists of cutting a mortise, or socket, into the edges of two planks and fastening them together with a rectangular wooden knob. The assembly is then locked in place by driving a dowel through one or more holes drilled through the mortise side wall and tenon.
The Phoenician shipwrecks of Mazarrón are two wrecks dated to the 7th century BC, found off the coast of Mazarrón, in the Region of Murcia, Spain. The Mazarrón I was discovered in 1988 and has undergone excavation, extraction, and restoration since 1993. It is currently on display at the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in Cartagena. The second shipwreck, dubbed Mazarrón II, was discovered in 1994, and was found in a better state of preservation. After years of study, its was extracted in November 2024. The shipwrecks demonstrates hybrid shipbuilding techniques including pegged mortise and tenon joints, as well as sewn seams, providing evidence of technological experimentation in maritime construction during the Iron Age.
The Zambratija shipwreck is a Late Bronze Age shipwreck dated to the 12th to 10th century BCE discovered in the Bay of Zambratija near Umag on Croatia's Istrian peninsula in the Mediterranean Sea.
