CHAPTER V 



CANOES AND A VOYAGE 



Unless one is very fond of the water and a good sailor, 

 travelling by canoe becomes tedious or even unpleasant. 

 If merely a passenger one sits right forward in the bows 

 and, when the lake is anything else than smooth, very 

 soon gets well splashed. I always took the steering 

 paddle and found it great fun ; a good deal of skill is 

 required to keep a heavy canoe true to its course when a 

 strong beam wind persistently blows the bows round. 



The canoe (" Eryato ") made by the Basesse is of a 

 peculiarly interesting type, since in the first place it forms 

 a link between a " dug-out " and a built vessel, and in 

 the second place shows how the keel of a modern boat 

 represents all that is left of an original dug-out. ^ In the 

 old days of warfare on the lake between the Basesse of 

 the islands and the Baganda of the mainland, these canoes 

 were of very large size, and I have heard it said that they 

 could accommodate fifty paddlers. 



The most important part is the keel (" Omugongo "), 

 which is hewn from a tree of a particular species, found 

 by experience to provide the best wood for the purpose. 

 It is very thick and solid, with a rounded bottom and 

 hollowed-out upper surface, so that in transverse section 

 it is concavo-convex ; it is, in other words, a " dug- 

 out." Seen from above, it is broader in the middle than 

 at the ends. 



^ Mr. Henry Balfour pointed this out when I gave him a model for 

 the Pitt Rivers collection at Oxford. 



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