The next evidence of comparable methods of building comes in the C56BC when Caesar engaged and defeated the fleet of the Celtic tribe known as the Venetii who opposed him with ships of a type unfamiliar to the Romans. Caesar describes the ships of the Venetii as being flat bottomed, with very high sides and high rising stems and sterns. The bottoms boards were held together by +cross beams which were bolted through the bottom boards by massive iron bolts and caulked with seaweed. The method of building was massive. The oak timbers of the Veneti ships were impervious to the Roman rams and the high sides prevented the Romans from boarding. Unlike the Roman galleys which were uncomfortable in the waters of the North Atlantic the ships of the Veneti were capable sailers which could be defeated only by grappling their sails and disabling them so that the Roman marines could board and fight in their accustomed way. These methods of shipbuilding were quite alien to the Roman practices, but the use of massive scantlings and heavy flat bottom boards held together by cross beams bolted through is obviously related to the techniques seen at Ferriby and Brigg. The heaviness of the build was, in part perhaps, a consequence of a particular design philosophy carried over from architectural woodworking, but it also reflects fundamental weaknesses in design, especially in the support of the stem and the stern posts in later double ended Celtic boats, which could be compensated for only by used massive framing. Similar boats have been discovered in large numbers in the Dutch polders, at Druten and Zwammerdam, and from the Rhine and the Swiss Lakes, in London, and in Guernsey mostly dated from C1BC to C1AD, (see NAVIS list for more details) and in contemporary vernacular boats in Portugal. All suggest a distinctive method of boat building which is neither entirely shell nor entirely skeleton in character. This technique appears to have developed in Britain and on the Western Atlantic seaboard of Europe. It has been described as a Celtic method of boat building, though its seems possible to push it back at least to the second Millenium in origins. It is distinct from the Mediterranean methods of building which the Romans were familiar with, and from the method of building which developed in he Nordic regions, though early Celtic and Nordic methods share a common use of stitching and cleating for fastenings. It differs also from the skin boats used by the Welsh, Irish and Scots. One other common characteristic of these Celtic boat types was the extensive and often complex use of caulking between the carvel strakes.(438) (Zwammerdam).
This distinction may be explained in part of topographical determinism. Skin boats developed in economically and socially backward areas where suitable wood for boat building, or the tools necessary to work it, may not have been plentiful. The Celtic wooden boats developed in wood rich areas where timber was so plentiful that it could be used wastefully. Initially these boats used the stitching and clamping methods, but by the Roman period the clamps and cleats had been replaced by frames and floors which held the bottom boards together and provided a skeleton to which the planking could be clench nailed. The origins of this tradition must lie in the dugout, particularly the extended dugout and the dugout split into two to produce chine girders to strengthen the point at which the sides strakes are joined to the bottom boards, an inevitably weak spot in a vessel of this kind. Improvements in construction were made possible by the availability of bronze and iron tools, factors which had no significance for the production of skin boats. Since skin boats rapidly reached the limit of their technological development they remained much the same from the stone age to the present day.
- or a rowing boat? What does a curragh look like?
I don't quite know what a curragh looks like! I have a nice Osprey picture of a big Pictish skin boat (!!!), and an outline of a Venetii curragh (that Julius Caesar managed to sink a lot of because there wasn't any wind that day) that sucks...
