Halkett boat
Peter Halkett was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy in the 1840s. His first design was a collapsible and inflatable boat made of rubber-impregnated cloth. When deflated, the hull of the boat could be worn as a cloak, the oar used as a walking stick, and the sail as an umbrella.
About Halkett boat in brief
Peter Halkett was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy in the 1840s. His first design was a collapsible and inflatable boat made of rubber-impregnated cloth. When deflated, the hull of the boat could be worn as a cloak, the oar used as a walking stick, and the sail as an umbrella. This was followed by a two-man craft that was small enough to fit into a knapsack, and when deflated served as a waterproof blanket. Although widely praised by Canadian explorers, his designs had a limited market, and he was unable to persuade the Navy that they would serve any useful purpose in general naval service. Efforts to market them as platforms for fishing and duck shooting failed, and they were commercially unsuccessful. Only two boats, that of Orcadian explorer John Rae, and one held in the Hudson’s Bay Company Museum Collection at the Manitoba Museum are known to survive today.
The boat-cloak was positively received by explorers by John Richardson; John Richardson wrote that had we been possessed of such a contrivance, I have little doubt of our first expedition in our first season in the Arctic would have brought the whole party safely to safety. In November 1844 he hoped to test the boat-Cloak in bad weather conditions, but the rough seas of the Biscay were too calm. He was forced to take down his umbrella by half a day, and later recalled that the winds that day were too civil and almost sleepless and the bay almost quite dormant. The Halket boat was the first of its kind to be used by the British Royal Navy, and is the only one still in production today. It is now owned by the Museum of Natural History in Toronto, Canada, where it is displayed alongside a collection of other early examples of inflatable boats.
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This page is based on the article Halkett boat published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
