On a bright March afternoon, a slender, 50ft-long boat made her maiden voyage across calm Cornish waters, powered by the paddle-strokes of an 18-strong crew. With a hull made from oak planks shaped using bronze-bladed tools and painstakingly stitched together with flexible twists of yew, the vessel represented the very latest in boat-building technology in c.2000 BC – while the launch took place in AD 2013.
Named after a sea monster reputed to lurk beneath the surface of Falmouth Bay, Morgawr was built at the National Maritime Museum Cornwall (NMMC) as part of an archaeological experiment, led by Professor Robert Van de Noort (then of the University of Exeter, now at the University of Reading), to investigate how sewn-plank boats were built and used during the Early Bronze Age.
These vessels marked a technological step-change from the dug-out canoes and skin boats used by earlier communities, but as their development pre-dates the widespread use of iron by several centuries, their hulls were sewn, rather than nailed, together. England and Wales boast the oldest known craft of this type in Atlantic Europe; the remains of ten have been discovered so far, ranging in date from c.2030 to c.760 BC. While portions of their hulls have been preserved in estuary mud and waterlogged sites for centuries, these remains are all tantalisingly fragmentary – leading to debates about what a complete boat might have looked like, and whether it was capable of operating on the open sea.
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