Coracles: Welsh Basket Boats, Vietnamese Tax Dodgers, and a Round Ark

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A 2014 translation of a 4,000 year old Babylonian cuneiform tablet revealed the oldest known ark instructions, in which the god Enki tells Atra-Hasis to build not a pointed ship but a giant round, waterproofed basket. That shape is the coracle, from the Welsh corwgl: split willow rods woven into a lattice, tied with willow bark, and covered with horse or bullock hide and tar, later with tarred canvas, calico, or fiberglass. With no keel it sits on the water rather than in it and floats in a few inches. Designs varied by river: Teifi coracles are flat bottomed, built of willow and hazel without nails, to slide over rocks at Cenarth Falls, while Tywi coracles in Carmarthen use sawn ash and copper nails for deeper, rounder, tidal work. Paddlers scull a figure eight over the bow, and pairs of coracles drift silently with a net between them, stunning salmon with a club called a priest.

Julius Caesar saw coracles in Britain and had his troops build them in Spain, but British law nearly finished them: an 1863 tax on migratory fish, then 1930s rules that stopped new licenses and barred transfers to heirs. Ethnographer James Hornell recorded the last makers' methods in a 1938 book. Fred Davies retrieved footballs from the River Severn for Shrewsbury Town until 1979, and in 1974 Bernard Thomas paddled a coracle across the English Channel in 13 and a half hours to support the Prince Madoc legend and a link to Mandan bull boats. Relatives appear worldwide, up to Iraq's quffa, 18 feet across and carrying four to five tons.

• A Welsh proverb says the load of a man is his coracle, since fishermen carried them home on their backs.
• Tibet's version used yak skin, and South America's pelota had no frame and folded for horseback travel.
• Vietnam's bamboo thung chai dodged French colonial boat taxes because they had no bow, stern, or keel.
• Southern Indian coracles on the Kaveri and Tungabhadra sandwich LDPE plastic between bamboo, and some at Hogenakkal carry eight tourists.
• Many scholars think baby Moses's basket on the Nile was a small bitumen coated coracle.