Men first went down to the sea not in ships, or even boats. They used what- ever expedients they could find to get themselves across deep water.
Some of these expedients are still in use, historian Lionel Casson notes in Ships and Seamanship in the An-cient World (Princeton, 1986). "A New Zealand aborigine today paddles over lakes astride a bundle of reeds, an Iraqi herdsman crosses streams on an in- flated goatskin, a Tamil native does his fishing drifting with a log under his arms while...