Month: May 2011

Beale Park Boat Show: Bart Jan Bats shows a Nigel Irens daysailer

Bart Jan Bats BJ17

 

Bart Jan Bats has written to say the company will be at the Beale Park Boat Show (10-12 June) to show its distinctive Nigel Irens daysailer, the trailable BJ17 , which has a polyester hull with modern lines, a balanced lug rig (a single-masted gaff rig is also available) and a large self-draining  cockpit.

The company says the two masted lug has several advantages: a higher rig, it drives the boat better, especially in light winds, and the mizzen makes it easy to keep the boat pointing into the wind when hoisting sails or anchoring. Also, the sheets of both sails come together near the helmsman, which
makes single-handed sailing easy, while the rest of the cockpit is free of lines, allowing four people to be seated in comfort.

Some buyers may prefer the more familiar gaff-rigged version, however.

Bart Jan Bats will also be showing a Thames launch currently available for sale. It is built in cedar strip covered with 7mm mahogany, and finished with epoxy and a two-component polyurethane varnish. The deck is maple with mahogany, while the floor is teak with koto lines. The motor is a Volvo Penta 10hp.

Thames launch Ashling for sale

Beale Park Boat Show preview: De Bootbouwschool boatbuilding school shows the Hanze yawl

Hanze yawl Bert van Baar De Bootbouwschool

Hanze yawl Bert van Baar De Bootbouwschool Hanze yawl Bert van Baar De Bootbouwschool Hanze yawl Bert van Baar De Bootbouwschool

Bert van Baar has written to say that at the Beale Park Boat Show (10-12th June) the De Bootbouwschool will be showing the good-looking Hanze yawl, which he and colleagues designed last winter during a three-day course on lofting.

With the aid of Pepijn van Schaik of Manta Marine Design, the school has now made a set of plans available to purchase; the boat will also be available as a kit this year.

The boat was built during a nine-day boatbuilding course with five people in my workshop during March – she is to be finished by the student who was lucky enough to win the boat in a lottery, although I don’t think this will be completed before the show.

The Hanze yawl will be rigged in the same way as Iain Oughtred’s Ness Yawl as standard, although other rigging arrangements are available on demand.

Bert himself has just finished a whitehall rowing boat with sliding seats for a Dutch owner, and is now building an example of Oughtred’s Kotik design for a Russian customer – it’s a streched version of the well known Wee Seal.

PS – We’ve just passed 2,000,000 hits!

 

 

 

A remarkable history of the slave trade

Slave canoe of the 1840s

Slave canoe drawing from The Illustrated London News, 1849; image reference EO22, as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library. In West Africa, these canoes were the main vehicles for transporting slaves from the coast to transatlantic vessels. According to The Illustrated London News, the canoes could carry 200 slaves, and were said to be 40ft long, 12ft 7-8ft deep

 

Intheboatshed.net regular Ed Bachmann has drawn my attention to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database website, and the recently published prize-winning book Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The database provided the basis for the atlas in which historians David Eltis and David Richardson have created a comprehensive, 350-year history of kidnapping and coercion featuring nearly 200 maps.

Between 1501 and 1867, the transatlantic slave trade claimed an estimated 12.5 million Africans and involved almost every country with an Atlantic coastline. The extraordinary online Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database includes records of nearly 35,000 slaving voyages, or about 80 per cent of all such voyages ever made. The maps show which nations participated in the trade, where the ships involved were outfitted, where the captives boarded ship, and where they were landed in the Americas, details the experiences of the transatlantic voyages and the eventual abolition of the traffic.

There are also illustrations and contemporary literary selections, including poems, letters, and diary entries that reveal the human story underlying the trade.

If you don’t buy the book, you can read Professor Eltis’s long essay on the website: A Brief Overview of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on the website.

Thanks for the tipoff Ed!