The next step in the construction of vessels was the building up of canoes or boats by fastening pieces of wood together in a suitable form. Some of these canoes, and probably the earliest in type, are tied or stitched together with thongs or cords. The Madras surf boats are perhaps the most familiar example of this type, which, however, is found in the Straits of Magellan and in Central Africa (on the Victoria Nyanza), in the Malay Archipelago and in many islands of the Pacific. Some of these canoes show a great advance in the art of construction, being built up of pieces fitted together with ridges on their inner sides, through which the fastenings are passed. (See Captain Cook's account of the Friendly Islands, La Perouse on Easter Island, and Williams on the Fiji Islands.) They achieved some of the advantages of a more elastic structure which gives ease in a seaway, and a com parative immunity where more rigid boats would not hold to gether. Vessels thus stitched together, and with an inserted frame work, have from a very early time been constructed in the Eastern seas far exceeding in size anything that would be called a canoe, and in some cases attaining to 200 tons burthen.
From the stitched form the next step onwards is to fasten the materials out of which the hull is built up by pegs or treenails; and of this system early types appear among the Polynesian islands and in the Nile boats, the prototype of the modern "nuggur." Some of the early types of boats belonging to the North Sea present an intermediate method, in which the planks are fastened together with pins or treenails, and are attached to the ribs by cords passing through holes in the ribs and corresponding holes bored through ledges cut on the inner side of each plank.
The ribs of the modern vessel are the development of the frame work originally inserted after the completion of the hull of the canoe or built-up boat, but with the difference that they are now prior in the order of fabrication.