Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Obscure Ships - Five vessels that deserve to be better known" video.

  1. The Inca rafts are fascinating, but make me think that you might look at Pacific traditional craft. Like, catamarans, with shunting rather than tacking. The Auckland (NZ) Maritime Museum has a display of various traditional Polynesian (and Melanesian) vessels, and what is striking is the range between long distance cargo boats, and little outriggers that you use to go from one side of the lagoon to the other, the equivalent of the bicycle. If you don't have a lot of flat ground, the wheel is no big deal. And, indeed, water transport could beat road and rail up into the middle of the 19th c., and can still beat it for some freight. In passing, about the Stone Age. That's a real thing, but there's a terrible tendency to conflate material culture with intellectual development. Until contact with Europeans, NZ Maori had no metal, and no writing. As soon as they met metal, they knew this was the thing, and the style of woodcarving changed. Maori were magnificent navigators, but they also quickly mastered the new European style of sailing boats, and in the early days of European settlement were dominant in the coastal trade. And by the middle of the 19th c., there were Maori language printing presses. Technology transfer, as we see in Japan, and then China, and now South East Asia, is a real thing, and can happen very fast.
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