THE SPORT OF ROWING would hold the crew and as long as desirable for flotation.”234 Prior to outriggers, oars “were of vary- ing lengths because in the inrigged boats of those days, the leverage varied with the width of the boat at each thwart.235 [In the case of the 1829 Oxford boat shown on the previous page] the shortest at bow was 13ft. 6in. overall, buttoned at 3ft. 7in., and the longest at 4 was 15ft. 3½in. overall, but- toned at 4ft. 2½in.236”237 Shells Towards the end of the 1850s came smooth skins and internal keels.238 Boats with these innovations were called shells.239 Byrne & Churchill: “The clinker-built boat goes through the water steadily but comparatively slowly. The smooth-skinned hull moves faster but is liable to roll. Unless this difference between clinker-built and carvel-built is thoroughly grasped, it is diffi- cult to understand why the introduction of smooth-skinned boats came so late.”240 Even so, in only twenty-five or so years emerged craft nearly identical to the racing shells of today, lacking only sliding seats, swivel oarlocks and advanced structural ma- terials. Technique Becomes Important The introduction of outriggers, or rig- gers as they are now commonly called, was 234 Byrne & Churchill, p. 214 235 seat 236 411.5cm, 109cm inboard versus 466cm, 128cm inboard. This is up to 20% longer than oars in use today. 237 Burnell, Swing, p. 5 238 Rowe & Pitman, p. 16 239 No boat is ever properly called a scull. A scull is an oar used in sculling. 240 Byrne & Churchill, p. 205 the most significant and far-reaching inno- vation in rowing history. It was intended to make boats faster, but it also had three major unintended consequences. 1. Boats became so delicate that “‘jostling,’ or as we now would call it, fouling, be- came too destructive and dangerous to be retained.”241 2. “The narrower boats still had to carry the same weight, and so they had to be built longer in order to make up for the lost buoyancy. The oarsmen could now get an uninterrupted swing forward, without butting up against the back of the man in front. And it was not very long before they discovered that by inching forward on their seats they could actually get a longer stroke. 3. “Narrower boats were harder to balance, “making an immediate demand for a neat- er, more skillful style of rowing.”242 Rudie Lehmann: “The big, roomy cut- ters [formerly] used by the oarsmen no doubt precluded them from those niceties of form and watermanship so important to those who propel the frail pieces of refined cabinet-work that do duty as racing ships at the present day [1908].”243 Turn-of-the-century University of Penn- sylvania oarsman and later rowing historian Samuel Crowther, Jr.:244 “As yet there had not been much attention paid to style; the object was to get there, and so long as a man was in time, it did not much matter what he was doing inside the [boat]. “With the introduction of shells, rather more attention was given to body form be- cause of the difficulties of ‘setting up’ the shell, but no one crew had any settled stroke. It was merely a question of power, and the biggest men were the favorites.”245 241 Ibid, p. 214 242 Mendenhall, Harvard-Yale, p. 47 243 Lehmann, p. 24 244 See Chapter 36. 245 Crowther, pp. 31-2 72
