Tag Archives: Heritage Boatbuilding

Clio’s Armada: Napoleon III and His Trireme

When I first began to delve into the topic of heritage boatbuilding, I wondered what the first modern example of it might be. The earliest I have found is that of Napoleon III and his 1860s efforts to rebuild a classical Hellenic trireme (!). That’s just a great sentence. Victorian Europe was fascinated by theirContinue reading “Clio’s Armada: Napoleon III and His Trireme”

Clio’s Armada: Ngātokimatawhaorua and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds

I spent almost two years in New Zealand/Aotearoa and found some magnificent examples of heritage boat-building among the Indigenous Maori and the settler Pakeha peoples. One of my favourite stories was Ngātokimatawhaorua, a waka (canoe), built in the 1930s. It taught me so much about how heritage boatbuilding can be meaningful to communities, both toContinue reading “Clio’s Armada: Ngātokimatawhaorua and the Waitangi Treaty Grounds”