From dugout canoes to steam trawlers: how fishing boats evolved
The oldest boats ever dug up are Neolithic canoes, hollowed from conifer logs with stone tools 7,000 to 9,000 years ago. They could barely leave the shore, but they were built to catch fish. Thousands of years of refinement later, a sleek sailing trawler from a Devon village changed fishing worldwide.
A 7,000-year-old seagoing craft of reeds and tar has turned up in Kuwait, and by about 3000 BC Egyptians were lashing wooden planks together with woven straps and stuffing the seams with reeds. Around 1000 AD Norse shipwrights built wide cargo knarrs and slim fast longships, and their fishing boats were smaller copies of the cargo type. Yoles from the Orkney island of Stroma were still built the Norse way long afterwards.
The Dutch herring buss, probably first launched in Hoorn around 1415, became a model across Europe. About 20 metres long, it trailed drifting gill nets, and crews of eighteen to thirty gutted, salted and barrelled herring right on deck. England's 17th-century dogger was smaller and slow but sturdy enough for the North Sea, carrying a tonne of bait and three of salt out and bringing back six tonnes of fish. In New England, flat-bottomed dories descended from French river bateaus; the Banks dories of the 1830s nested inside one another on schooner decks bound for the cod of the Grand Banks.
Overfishing off South Devon pushed Brixham fishermen farther out in the early 1800s, and their tall-rigged trawler was fast enough to reach ocean grounds and strong enough to drag big nets in deep water. Brixham earned the title Mother of Deep-Sea Fisheries, and the red sails of one such boat, the Torbay Lass, inspired the song Red Sails in the Sunset. Grimsby grew into the world's largest fishing port, with a dock opened by Queen Victoria in 1854 and gates and cranes run on hydraulic power.
Steam arrived in the 1870s. In 1875 David Allan of Leith converted a drifter to steam, and in 1877 he built Pioneer, the first screw-propelled steam trawler. Steel hulls with watertight compartments followed, masts became cranes for unloading, and tall thin funnels nicknamed woodbines, after a cigarette brand, carried coal smoke above a crew of twelve.
Source: Fishing vessel
