Cameo corner: Making a paper boat

For this programme, Time Team reconstructed a paper boat. This was in an attempt to re-enact one of Queenborough's more bizarre happenings when, back in 1614, an eccentric Thames ferryman named John Taylor, who called himself the ‘water poet’, made an extraordinary journey from London to Queenborough in a paper boat. Taylor's 40-mile journey stood as the world-record distance travelled in a paper boat until Tim FitzHigham broke it for Comic Relief in 2003. Tim and his associate, Stephen Wisdom, were called upon by Time Team to try to reconstruct a boat such as John Taylor's. Tim FitzHigham gives an account of the experience.

You've had some previous experience in rowing a paper boat, haven't you?
A bit. The paper boat record set by John Taylor was the world's oldest surviving maritime record. It had stood at the 40-mile distance that Taylor rowed until in 2003 I decided to try to break it to raise some money for Comic Relief. I found Taylor's story in the footnote of a very dusty history book in a very dusty corner of a library and then forgot all about it for four years, till Comic Relief phoned up.

My trip down the river was amazing. Like Taylor's boat, mine just about held together to help me make it the staggering distance of 160 miles. What's left of my paper boat is now in the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall. 

What was the aim of the programme cameo?
My original paper boat was made of sheets of A4 and A3 recycled paper, put together by me and a very experienced boat maker called Mega Kayaks. It was made in much the same way that you used to make papier mache balloon heads when you were five.

Taylor's boat, on the other hand, was made of hempseed paper, varnished with the same varnish people would have used on wooden boats in the 17th century. The aim of the cameo was to see if a hempseed boat would hold up in the water, as the only source we have that Taylor's story is true is Taylor himself – and he could have just made it up. 

Mind you, if it hadn't worked and we'd proved he didn't make the paper boat journey, that would have meant I'd spent months of my life on a river not breaking the world's oldest maritime record but a figment of a deranged 17th-century poet's imagination! This would have been a blow to me, so I'm quite pleased it worked.

What materials were used?
We used giant sheets of hempseed paper, lots of hempseed string and varnish – lots of varnish. Hempseed is one of the things they used to make paper in the 17th century. When Taylor rowed his paper boat he was trying, in his own special way, to prove that British hempseed paper was the best in the world – today he would be the head of marketing somewhere. 

We also followed Taylor's example and made the oars out of two giant dried fish – he was a genius! – strapped to two canes. Taylor turned his time in his paper boat into a poem called 'In Praise of Hempseed, or the voyage of Mr Roger Bird and the writer hearof in a boat made of Browne-Paper'. Despite its catchy title, it is sadly not on tour around the UK at the moment.

How did your team make the boat?
We folded the paper as you would fold an envelope and then stitched it around the sides. In fact, we basically made a giant envelope like you would post a letter in and then made big loo rolls out of the remaining hempseed paper to keep the envelope open at the top so that I didn't get stuck in it and sink. It's not the best design for a boat but as Taylor left us no drawings, and the time on Time Team is really short, we did not have much choice but to try this and hope it worked.

What was the hardest part of the task?
By far the hardest moments were the first seconds the boat hit the water. If you're a boat maker or know about boats it's easy making something that will theoretically float but whether it will actually float is a different thing. That first second when I was on the water was very exciting/scary. Would it sink without trace and me with it or would it make it back to the shore? Trusting something that's essentially made of paper and loo roll not to sink was by far the hardest part of the task for me.

Did you learn anything by doing the reconstruction?
I learned that the key to everything is rowlocks. If you have a firm place to pull the oars through the water then you will always be fine, no matter what you make the boat out of. You can make the boat out of cheese if you like but as long as the point of contact between the oars and the boat is firm, you're fine. If the point that connects the oar to the boat is flimsy – if it is made of hempseed, for example – then you've got trouble. 

What we actually discovered, after we'd finished filming, was that the boat we made worked much, much better as a kayak or canoe rather than as a rowing boat. This is how I broke the record in 2003, by taking the strain off the hull of the boat and using a freestanding paddle. This is also probably how Taylor ended up propelling his boat as it disintegrated around him. We know that by the end of his third day on the river he was actually swimming and punting the now soggy circle of paper along with his nose. But according to him, he set off rowing and that's what we wanted to try to test.

If you did it again would you have done it differently?
Nope. It really did work and that's the amazing thing, You've got to take your sou'wester off to all the team involved. I think I'd have liked a bit more time for the varnish to dry, as if we'd had longer we could have put more coats of varnish on and that might just have made it a bit stronger – especially the fish oars, which got very soggy.

Are there any other reconstructions you would like to try?
Lots and lots. As a small boy I was obsessed with Thor Heyerdahl, the man who took a papyrus raft across the sea from Morocco to Barbados and a balsa wood raft from Peru to Polynesia. This was very much the kind of archaeology I loved – epic, water based and with little chance of success. So, in a small way, getting to do the paper boat reconstruction was archaeological heaven to me.

It's great when archaeology feeds practical work and vice versa. In all the other sciences, people in goggles get a hypothesis and test it, and so often in archaeology this testing bit of the science is left out. It's clearly there in labs – dendrochronology is a good example – but so often (probably due to time again) in the field we don't get a chance.

For me, the reconstructions really make me believe more in the theory. They're also often great fun and in this one I got to meet the mayor of the Isle of Sheppey. What more could you ask for?

Tim FitzHigham's day job is writing and telling jokes. His website is at www.fitzhigham.com

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