L'ÉPAVE DE BON-PORTÉ ET LES BATEAUX COUSUS DE MÉDITERRANÉE

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Summary Several theories have been proposed to date to explain the unusual assembly method employed in the Bon-Porté wreck or the sixth century BC. None of these appears to be totally satisfactory and if it is likely, as Lucien Basch has suggested, that the Bon-Porté ship is the original sewn ship, it is on the other hand hardly probable that it had been totally assembled with horizontal dowels after the oblique holes for the ligatures had been totally blocked with small dowels. The little-known wreck of a sewn ship of the Roman period found near Nin in Yugoslavia would appear to provide the answer. The ligatures, which are still in place, are in effect secured in position by the dowels and this is certainly the precise role of the small oblique dowels which were found in the Bon-Porté wreck. Such a practice appears to have been common since there is evidence of it in an Iron Age wreck found at Ljubljana, in the Roman ship at Cervia and in the Medieval wreck at Pomposa. It is also to be found in Sweden in the seventeenth century as well as on the east coast of Africa (e.g. the Lamu mtepe and the Somalia beden). The double assembly of planking by horizontal dowels and ligatures which is a characteristic of the Bon-Porté wreck is thus no longer exceptional. Parallels may be found in ancient Egypt and the practice exists in identical form in the Laquedive Islands and in Somalia. This double assemblage, however, poses the problem of how the techniques of sewn ligature fastening evolved. The ancient sewn wrecks of Bon-Porté, Nin and Cervia prove that assembly with ligatures, which on textual evidence was already known in Homeric times, never totally disappeared even when the tenon and mortise technique predominated. Ligatures were still occasionally employed on a limited scale on tenon and mortise built ships (the Cavalière and Jeaune Garde B wrecks). One is thus required to reconsider the Roman texts which speak of sewn ships and which savour as much of archaic notions as of an actual and familiar reality. The persistance of ligature assembly finally proves that one cannot reduce the history of ancient ship construction to one whose sole technique was tenons and mortises.