The 1498 illustration of the Paper Boat

Conclusive Evidence or Wishful Thinking?

The Paper Boat is one of the most familiar and enduring of the traditional paperfolding designs, and one of the very few that can be evidenced in both the Japanese and European paperfolding traditions at an early date. (This is where you cudgel your brain to think what the others are.)

The earliest evidence for the existence of the Paper Boat in Europe is an illustration located by the Spanish paperfolder Vicente Palacios. It is printed in the book ‘Uberrimum sphere mundi commentum intersertis etiam questionibus domini Petri de Aliaco', which was published in Paris in 1498, and appears (see detail below) to show two Paper Boats floating in a stylised sea.

The complete page this detail is taken from looks like this:

This book (I will spare you a repetition of the title) is a version of the much earlier book 'Tractatus de Sphaera Mundi' by Johannes de Sacrobosco (an English mathematician and astronomer more familiarly known as John Holywood). There are many, many versions of this earlier book. The original had no illustrations, but illustrations were added in later editions to make the meaning of the text clearer and the volume more attractive to potential purchasers.

The illustration from the 1498 version (again I spare you the title) was purloined from another version of ‘de Sphaera Mundi’ which had been published in Venice ten years earlier, in 1488. Here is the original version:

If you compare the two, you will see that the later one has been greatly simplified. In the earlier illustration, the boat has a mast and (furled?) sails. There are also ducks and fish in the sea. In the later illustration the fish and ducks have disappeared and there are now two boats, both drawn in a much simpler style. The question though, is this: Are these two boats just simplified drawings of real boats or has the engraver, for reasons best known to himself, decided to include drawings of Paper Boats instead? Does the 1498 illustration amount to conclusive evidence of the existence of the Paper Boat design at this date, or is this just wishful thinking?

I will present the evidence, and you can be the judge.

The first thing to say is that, unfortunately, ‘Uberrimum sphere mundi commentum intersertis etiam questionibus domini Petri de Aliaco' (sorry, I couldn’t resist) contains no descriptive text that might help the identification either way.

So what about other similar illustrations? Ah, well, there aren’t any. The next earliest illustration which clearly depicts the Paper Boat appears in ‘The Boy's Own Toymaker' by Ebenezer Landells in 1859, after a gap of 361 years (Yes, you read that correctly). Long gaps in the evidence for the existence of a design are pretty standard in paperfolding history. But 361 years?

Fortunately, we can close the gap (to some extent) by relying on written evidence.

There is no written evidence for the existence of paper boats from the 16th century, but mentions begin to appear in the early 17th. The earliest I know of is in the Spanish book 'Libro de los sermones de los santos' by Miguel Perez de Heredia, which was published in 1605. Of course, this is still a gap of 107 years from 1498.

Mere mentions of a ‘paper boat’ (or ‘bateau de papier’ or ‘barco de papel’ etc) are, however, not really reliable evidence, since the term can be used with several meanings. Sometimes, for instance, it is used to mean ‘papyrus reed boats’ such as were used in antiquity (and possibly still are) on the river Nile. Sometimes it is used metaphorically to mean something you can’t depend on. (Yes, a mention of ‘paper boats’ is indeed a paper boat.)

Much more reliable are those references that directly link paper boats to children’s play. The earliest of those comes from the novel 'Urania' by Mary Wroath, Countess of Montgomerie, which was published in 1621. She describes an errant ship: ‘unguided she was, unrul’d, and unman’d, tumbling up and downe, like the Boates boyes make of paper, and play withall upon little brookes’.

From then on, references come fairly thick and fast, though none of them contains a good enough description of these boats for us to be sure they are the design we call the Paper Boat today.

Hmmm. Sorry, but I can’t help becoming distracted at this point and showing you a reference to a paper boat being used to help demonstrate that a magnetised needle will default to point north / south. This appears in 'The Navigator's Assistant' by William Nicholson, which was published in London in 1784.

Nor can I resist mentioning that another famous book, Thomes Paine’s 'The Age of Reason', which was published in 1794, also contains a passage mentioning a paper boat.

You can find many more references on the Public Paperfolding History Project page about Paper Boats here. Taken all together they form a chain stretching back into the past which shows that children have been making paper boats for a long, long time. But the question is: What kind of paper boats? Do we believe that all the paper boats mentioned in this chain are indeed the familiar Paper Boat design? Or could they be paper boats of another, or indeed, of various kinds?

The crucial evidence here is surely the 1498 illustration. If we accept that this shows Paper Boats, then it anchors one end of the chain and we can be reasonably sure that at least most of the links refer to Paper Boats. If we believe otherwise there is no evidence at all to show what the early paper boats were like.

I confess that I can’t make up my mind about this question. Could it be that seeing those simplified drawings of boats in the 1498 illustration as Paper Boats is just an example of confirmation bias, and that I am only seeing what I would very much wish to see? Or is the evidence solid enough to reasonably lead to this conclusion?

Fortunately, it’s not my call. You are the judge, and you must decide the question for yourself …