Note 533 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

In treeless lands, reeds growing on the margins of streams and lakes are utilized for the construction of boats. The Buduma islanders of Lake Chad use clumsy skiffs eighteen feet long, made of hollow reeds tied into bundles and then lashed together in a way to form a slight cavity on top.533 In the earliest period of Egyptian history this type of boat with slight variations was used in the papyrus marshes of the Nile,534 and it reappears as the ambatch boat which Schweinfurth observed on the upper White Nile.535 It is in use far away among the Sayads or Fowlers, who inhabit the reed-grown rim of the Sistan Lake in arid Persia.536 As the Peruvian balsa, it has been the regular means of water travel on Lake Titicaca since the time of the Incas, and in more primitive form it appears among the Shoshone Indians of the Snake River Valley of Idaho, who used this device in their treeless land to cross the streams, when the water was too cold for swimming.537 Still cruder rafts of reeds, without approach to boat form, were the sole vehicles of navigation among the backward Indians of San Francisco Bay, and were the prevailing craft among the coast Indians farther south and about the Gulf of Lower California.538 Trees abounded; but these remnant tribes of low intelligence, probably recent arrivals on the coast from the interior, equipped only with instruments of bone and stone, found the difficulty of working with wood prohibitive.