The first folding boat? (A.D. 1644)

[Steve Paskey]

I recently picked up the book "A Speck on the Sea: Epic Voyages in the Most Improbable Vessels" by William Longyard. Lots of great stories: some well known, others obscure.

One of the most fascinating is the story of William Okeley, an English mercenary who was captured by a Turkish ship in 1639 and sold into slavery in Algiers. In 1644 he and other English slaves began planning an escape. Over the course of several days they built a 12-foot folding boat in pieces, assembled it to check the fit, and disassembled it again. The pieces were then smuggled out of the city and hidden. The boat was made watertight by a fabric covering that was coated with a combination of tar, pitch, and tallow.

On the appointed evening seven men slipped out of the city, assembled the boat, and prepared to cast off. They quickly found that there wasn't enough freeboard to carry all seven, and two agreed to stay behind. The other five then paddled to freedom -- 180 MILES in 6 days over the Mediterranean to the Spanish island of Mallorca.

[ 12-27-2003, 10:44 PM: Message edited by: Steve Paskey ]

[brian.cunningham]

[htom]

There are old Norse legends of folding boats, but they were things of the gods, and magic.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Well done William Oakley!

I saw a BBC TV programme the other day which startled me by saying that one and a half million citizens of Western Europe were kidnapped and enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs from 1600 to 1900. Nine tenths of them were men, but women, of comely, were more valuable. A surprising number of the corsairs, including the notorious Murad Reis, who raided Iceland and Ireland, were Christian renegades - Murad Reis was a Dutchman by birth.

A citizen of Woodbridge, John Fox, was captured in the reign of Elizabeth 1.

In 1563, as a master gunner of the ship "Three Half Moons", on a voyage to Seville, his ship was captured by Turks and he was imprisoned at Alexandria.

After 14 years he planned a daring escape with several prisoners. They killed their captors, released 268 Christian prisoners and seized weapons and a galley.

Four weeks later, with eight men dead from thirst, they landed in friendly territory.

On his return to England in 1579, he received a pension of one shilling per day from Queen Elizabeth I for his “valiant action”.

[ 01-01-2004, 01:00 PM: Message edited by: Andrew Craig-Bennett ]

[Hwyl]

Skin boats are amongst the earliest boats, probably starting in Asia 8 to 10 thousand years ago. Curraghs were being (and may still be) used in Ireland 20 years ago on a regular basis. Then of course I have to mention coracles. No one knows how long kayaks have been around, but certainly the greenland type were regularly dissasembled.