Rowing is different from paddling
A paddle is held in the hands and pushed through the water without a fixed pivot. An oar is a lever. It rests against a fulcrum on the boat’s side, so that a pull on the handle inside moves the blade outside in the opposite direction. This simple difference changes how a boat has to be built, and much of the story of oared boat design is the story of improving the fulcrum, the seating and the shape of the hull around it.
The idea is very old. Oars were used in Egyptian river craft, and Mediterranean ships of the ancient world relied on them heavily. Early oars were sometimes steering oars as well as propulsion, and rowers could be arranged in one or several banks. How those warships were laid out is dealt with in the article on trireme design, and the sporting side of the story belongs to a different article. This one concentrates on the boat.
Tholes and rowlocks
The simplest fulcrum is a thole pin, a wooden peg fixed in the gunwale against which the oar rests. Pairs of pegs, or a notch, hold the oar in place. Leather loops or ropes were often used to keep the oar from slipping away. Tholes were widely used on the working boats of northern Europe and are well known from Viking-age vessels, whose lightly built hulls are described in the history of the clinker-built longship.
The rowlock, called an oarlock in North America, is a U-shaped fitting that holds the oar and lets it pivot. Metal rowlocks became common on small boats with the growth of metalworking, and their advantage is that they are sturdy and allow the oar to be shipped and unshipped easily. Variants include rowlocks set in a pad of wood on the gunwale. Designs differed by region and purpose, so no single date for their arrival would be accurate.
Hull design for rowing
A hull that is easy to row is not necessarily the same as one that sails well. Rowing boats tend to be relatively light, fairly narrow in proportion to their length and with finer ends than a boat that must carry heavy loads. For working boats such as ferrymen’s skiffs, harbour gigs and fishermen’s dories, practical qualities like stability, carrying capacity and the ability to be launched from a beach counted as much as speed.
Hull construction affected performance. Clinker, or lapstrake, building, with overlapping planks, produced strong, light boats and was common in northern Europe. Carvel building, with planks laid flush, gave a smoother surface. For fast boats, smoothness and low weight were the goals. Pilot gigs, naval cutters and the boats of the Thames watermen all show how builders balanced seaworthiness and speed.
Outriggers
In the context of rowing, an outrigger is a bracket that extends the rowlock beyond the side of the boat. Placing the pivot farther out allows a longer lever to be used with a narrower hull, so the boat can be slimmer and faster. This is a different meaning from the stabilising float of the Pacific outrigger canoe, though the name is the same.
A projecting frame for oars is very old: Greek warships carried an outrigger structure above the hull to hold the upper oars, according to the surviving evidence. Modern rowing outriggers developed in the nineteenth century, and the adoption of metal outriggers on racing boats, with the rowlock on a swinging arm, allowed boats to become much narrower. The exact order of invention and the credit for particular designs are disputed, and it would be misleading to name one inventor.
Sliding seats and the racing shell
Early racing boats used fixed seats, with the strength of the legs used little. Around the 1860s and 1870s, experimenters in Britain and North America introduced sliding seats that let the rower use the legs as well as the back and arms. Who deserves credit for the first successful version is disputed. The sliding seat did change technique and, in turn, hull proportions: a longer stroke made more power available, and boats needed to be built to use it.
Racing boats grew longer and slimmer. Builders moved from broad clinker hulls to very narrow, smooth-skinned craft, often called shells, built of thin planking or veneer over light frames, mostly of cedar and spruce. The modern shell is a carefully shaped, nearly keel-less hull with outriggers, a sliding seat for each rower and, in sweep rowing, a coxswain in some classes. From the later twentieth century, carbon fibre and other composites largely replaced wood in competitive boats, giving greater stiffness and lower weight.
Rowing for work and sport
Rowing as a form of transport lasted into the age of steam. Watermen on the Thames, boatmen at ports and tenders to larger ships relied on oars, and lifeboats were rowed for many years before engines took over, as the history of the lifeboat service explains. Doggett’s Coat and Badge race, a contest for Thames watermen first held in 1715, shows how working boatmen turned their trade into a contest.
Today the oared boat survives in sport, in traditional pilot gig racing and in fixed-seat heritage rowing, while the engineering ideas of leverage and low drag continue to inform the design of racing craft.