Afloat: Small Boats, Swell and Seaspray, by David Gange.
William Collins (An imprint of Harper Collins),
www.harpercollins.com. 304 pp., illus, $30.
For more than a century, the literature of small wooden boats has been continually enriched by book-length studies documenting shapes, construction details, and uses of specific local and indigenous watercraft. These tomes include Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle’s Bark and Skin Boats of North America; George Dyson’s Baidarka; a series of books by Bernard and Christian Faeroyvik and, later, Arne Emil Christensen on Nordic watercraft; C.R.G. Worcester’s The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze; and, more recently, Douglas Brooks’s studies of Japanese watercraft and Nova Scotia dories. And, of course, Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft is the seminal documentary study of historic American types, while John Gardner’s books on building classic small craft continued this effort, with an emphasis on guiding amateur construction. All of these works relied on field work and painstaking measurement to record ingenious but ephemeral small wooden boats.