The Egyptian Aiyassa

Continuing our observations from The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail by Neil Hollander and Harald Mertes, let's look at the Egyptian aiyassa, which is not at all related to the boats of ancient dynastic Egypt. The aiyassa is the characteristic big bulk carrier of the Nile, and when the book was published in 1984, there were still thousands of them in commercial use. Hollander states that the hull form was based on the Portuguese galleass (from which the word aiyassa is derived), and so strictly speaking, I shouldn't be addressing it, as it's from the Western tradition, but one look at the huge lateen rig, and I think that most readers will cut me slack.

Anyway, Hollander's aiyassa is a big boat for a river sailing craft -- the big ones weighed in at over 100 tons. They sported huge lateen rigs, with the tip of the boom soaring 100 feet in the air. They also carried a mizzen -- the word for the mizzen, by the way, being the same as in English, since it was an Arabic term to start with. The mainsail rig weighs close to a ton, and in The Last Sailors, it took four men a half hour to raise it, using tremendously crude machinery. In the author's observation, everything aboard was in a constant state of disintegration, and this is borne out by Mertes' photos, which show every bit of the rig pieced together with innumerable, horribly unshipshape knots and splices. There is no pride of seamanship or sentiment here -- the boat being viewed simply as an inexpensive tool with which to do a job.

Aiyassas carry bulk goods like hay and bricks. In 1984, the upriver (i.e., southbound) trade in finished goods had dried up, being overtaken by road and rail transport, so the boats would travel upriver empty, and only return to Cairo with cargoes. They would sail south on the prevailing breeze, and drift north with the current, essentially out of control, moving astern, abeam -- however the current wished to take them. Extremely beamy, the craft are regularly loaded to the utmost limits of their capacity, so that they ride with mere inches of freeboard. Since they're drifting downstream when laden, there seems to be little or no chance of heeling and shipping water over the gunwale, but in the "old days," when they ran upriver laden and under sail, this may not have been the case. They are, however, extremely beamy, providing a great deal of heeling resistance, even with their huge rigs.

Most boats, it seems, were owned by small merchants in Cairo, in fleets of a few boats. Crews were paid $114 a month, which I interpret as meaning the salary not for individual crew members, but the whole crew. (On the boat described, there were four crew members, including the captain.) Even in 1984, they were being displaced by diesel-powered, steel-hulled boats called sandals, and now I can't find anything about aiyassas by Googling, or on Wikipedia. Hard to believe they've disappeared not only from the river but also from the written record, so I have to presume that they're also known by another name, whether or not they're still in use. Can't even find photos by Googling "Nile Sailboat"-- only lots of photos of feluccas, which are much smaller craft. If anyone can point me to a good photo that I could borrow without infringing somebody's rights, please let me know and I'll post it here.

Finally, don't be misled by the ancient Egyptian boats in the links below -- they are unrelated to the aiyassa, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

Jangadas Again

Do check out the April 1 post on jangadas at http://rowingforpleasure.blogspot.com/ . Nice photos, and very nice Brazilian music with more jangada photos in the YouTube clip.

I had meant to discuss just a couple more details of the jangada's rig in my last post, but the subject got away from me, so here they are:

• The upper end of the mast is apparently very flexible: it appears bent severely back in every photo I've seen, and I presume that the bend is put there by tension on the mainsail's leech.
• The loose-footed sail is huge, but since it's made of muslin, it probably lets a good deal of wind through. The Jangadieros carry a carved wooden scoop with which they throw water on the sail to swell the fibers and make it a bit less porous to the wind.
• Most or all of the sails have advertisements printed on them. According to Hollander, savvy marketers in Brazil, who recognize the value of such a picturesque, tradition-laden image, provide the jangadieros with the sails for free.

All for now.

Jangadas: A Brazilian Fishing Craft

In my last post, I said I'd discuss the jangada in the next post. Here we are at the next post, but first, some news.

My employment as an editor at McGraw-Hill has ended due to a layoff. I had been acquiring and editing books on boating for the International Marine imprint, and on other outdoor sports like hiking, camping, paddlesports, RVing, skiing, etc., for Ragged Mountain Press. These imprints are being scaled back for strategic reasons, and so our Rockport, Maine, office was closed. Both imprints will apparently continue, but publishing far fewer books each year, so the two managers were retained, and all the line-workers let go.

Hence, I am now the proud proprietor of YOUR NAME HERE Communications, offering writing, editing, publishing consulting, and public relations services to private individuals (read: authors), small businesses, and publishers. I'll have a website up and running in a week or two, but if anyone wants information now, please feel free to contact me through this blog. Your query won't appear in the blog.

On to the good stuff. The jangada had its precolumbian origins as a raft plying nearshore waters on Brazil's northeast coast. (All this is per The Last Sailors: The Final Days of Working Sail, discussed in the previous post.) Soon after European contact, the demand for fish increased, and a sailing rig was added, but in its basic "log" form (more on this distinction soon), it's been unchanged for 400 years. It is a sailing raft built of pueba logs, lashed and pegged together, and sporting a rig with quite a large mailsail and (from what I can tell from the book's photos), sometimes a tiny jib. The mast angles forward very sharply, and the boom angles upward at the stern, so that the mainsail takes the shape of an isosceles triangle resting on its apex. There's a surprisingly sophisticated 11-position mast step that allows the mast's angle to be changed by a considerable amount, no doubt shifting the amount of weather/lee helm, but otherwise, the jangada is about as simple as a craft can be. The jangadieros, or jangada fishermen, take these boats 30 miles offshore in search of market fish, with the logs awash the whole way. Steering is by way of an oar.

Crews are often two or three, and according to author Neil Hollander, it's a firm tradition that no one speaks during the whole 12 to 16 hours that the boat is fishing. How wonderful! No office-cooler crap about the Final Four, the presidential primaries, or American Idol!

The book also discusses a plank-built variant, the jangada tabua ("jangada of planks," pictured in the previous post) that hardly seems like a variant, and is evidently a different craft altogether with a similar name and milieu. From the photo and the book's description, it is clearly more of an open boat than a raft. It came into being when appropriate logs for rafts became scarce and sawn lumber became available as a feasible alternative. Probably, the name jangada was retained because the new boat was used by the same population, who knew fishing boats only by the name of jangada -- to them, the word didn't refer to a particular type, but was the equivalent of "fishing boat."

When Hollander wrote about the jangada more than 20 years ago, they were extremely scarce, having been elbowed out by more efficient fishing craft. It would be interesting to know if any of the jangadiero villages still exist, and if they still use the log-built type.

The photo of a model log-type jangada above is from Wikipedia by Wenn du Benutzer WHell. Sorry, Herr WHell, I've copied your credit, but I don't know German and can't provide your name properly, but many thanks for granting use through Wikipedia.

The product links below? Well, there aren't many jangada-related books or other products available, so we'll have to make do with "rafts." Who knew that Jules Verne wrote a raft book? What raft could be more storied, goried, and romantic than the Medusa's? And the children's book The Raft looks lovely, doesn't it?