Barge

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For other uses, see Barge (disambiguation).

Barges towed by a tugboat on the River Thames in London, England, UK

Barge nowadays generally refers to a flat-bottomed inland waterway vessel which
does not have its own means of mechanical propulsion.[1] The first modern barges
were pulled by tugs, but nowadays most are pushed by pusher boats, or other
vessels. The term barge has a rich history, and therefore there are many other
types of barges.

History of the barge

Etymology
"Barge" is attested from 1300, from Old French barge, from Vulgar Latin barga. The
word originally could refer to any small boat; the modern meaning arose around
1480. Bark "small ship" is attested from 1420, from Old French barque, from Vulgar
Latin barca (400 AD). The more precise meaning of Barque as "three-masted sailing
vessel" arose in the 17th century, and often takes the French spelling for
disambiguation. Both are probably derived from the Latin barica, from Greek baris
"Egyptian boat", from Coptic bari "small boat", hieroglyphic Egyptian

D58 G29 M17 M17 D21 P1

and similar ba-y-r for "basket-shaped boat".[2] By extension, the term "embark"
literally means to board the kind of boat called a "barque".

The British river barge

River barge below Barton Aqueduct c. 1793

A Dutch barge in Namur

In Great Britain a merchant barge was originally a flat bottomed merchant vessel
for use on navigable rivers.[3] Most of these barges had sails. For traffic on the
River Severn the barge was described as: The lesser sort are called barges and
frigates, being from forty to sixty feet in length, having a single mast and square
sail, and carrying from twenty to forty tons burthen. The larger vessels were
called trows.[4] On the River Irwell there was reference to barges passing below
Barton Aqueduct with their mast and sails standing.[5] Barges on the Thames were
called west country barges.[3]

Narrowboats and Widebeams

During the Industrial Revolution, a substantial network of narrow canals was
developed in Great Britain from 1750 onward. These new British canals had locks of
only 7 feet (2.1 m) wide. This led to the development of the narrowboats, which had
a beam of no more than 6 feet 10 inches (2.08 m). It was soon realized that the
narrow locks were too limiting. Later locks were therefore doubled in width to 14
feet (4.3 m). This led to the development of the widebeam.

The narrowboats were initially also known as barges, but only a very few had sails.
From the start, most of the new canals were constructed with an adjacent towpath,
which made it possible to tow them by draft horses. These types of canal craft are
so specific that on the British canal system the term 'barge' is not used to
describe narrowboats and widebeams.

The Thames barge and Dutch barge

On the British canal system, the Thames sailing barge, and Dutch barge and
unspecified other styles of barge, are still known as barges.[6] The term Dutch
barge is nowadays often used to refer to an accommodation ship, but originally
refers to the slightly larger Dutch version of the Thames sailing barge.

Crew and pole

The people who moved barges were known as lightermen. Poles are used on barges to
fend off other nearby vessels or a wharf. These are often called 'pike poles'. The
long pole used to maneuver or propel a barge has given rise to the saying "I
wouldn't touch that [subject/thing] with a barge pole."[7]

The 19th century British barge

Dumb barge on the Thames

In the United Kingdom the word barge had many meanings by the 1890s, and these
varied locally. On the Mersey a barge was called a 'Flat', on the Thames a Lighter
or barge, and on the Humber a 'Keel'.[8] A Lighter had neither mast nor rigging.[9]
A keel did have a single mast with sails.[8] Barge and lighter were used
indiscriminately. A local distinction was that any flat that was not propelled by
steam was a barge, although it might be a sailing flat.[8]

The term Dumb barge was probably taken into use to end the confusion. The term Dumb
barge surfaced in the early nineteenth century. It first denoted the use of a barge
as a mooring platform in a fixed place. As it went up and down with the tides, it
made a very convenient mooring place for steam vessels.[10] Within a few decades,
the term dumb barge evolved, and came to mean: 'a vessel propelled by oars only'.
[11] By the 1890s Dumb barge was still used only on the Thames.[12]

By 1880 barges on British rivers and canals were often towed by steam tugboats.[13]
On the Thames, many dumb barges still relied on their poles, oars and the tide.
Others dumb barges made use of about 50 tugboats to tow them to their destinations.
While many coal barges were towed, many dumb barges that handled single parcels
were not.[14]

The 19th century American barge

In the United States a barge was not a sailing vessel by the end of the 19th
century. Indeed, barges were often created by cutting down razeeing sailing
vessels.[15] In New York this was an accepted meaning of the term barge. The
somewhat smaller scow was built as such, but the scow also had its sailing
counterpart the sailing scow.

The modern barge

The iron barge
The innovation that led to the modern barge was the use of iron barges towed by a
steam tugboat. These were first used to transport grain and other bulk products.
From about 1840 to 1870 the towed iron barge was quickly introduced on the Rhine,
Danube, Don, Dniester, and rivers in Egypt, India and Australia. Many of these
barges were built in Great Britain.[16]

Nowadays 'barge' generally refers to a dumb barge.[17] In Europe, a Dumb barge is:
An inland waterway transport freight vessel designed to be towed which does not
have its own means of mechanical propulsion.[1] In America, a barge is generally
pushed.

Modern use
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Towboat pushing a barge on the Chicago River

Barges are used today for low-value bulk items, as the cost of hauling goods by
barge is very low. Barges are also used for very heavy or bulky items; a typical
American barge measures 195 by 35 feet (59.4 m × 10.7 m), and can carry up to about
1,500 short tons (1,400 t) of cargo. The most common European barge measures 251 by
37 feet (76.5 m × 11.4 m) and can carry up to about 2,450 tonnes (2,700 short
tons).

As an example, on June 26, 2006, a 565-short-ton (513 t) catalytic cracking unit

reactor was shipped by barge from the Tulsa Port of Catoosa in Oklahoma to a
refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Extremely large objects are normally shipped
in sections and assembled onsite, but shipping an assembled unit reduced costs and
avoided reliance on construction labor at the delivery site (which in this case was
still recovering from Hurricane Katrina). Of the reactor's 700-mile (1,100 km)
journey, only about 40 miles (64 km) were traveled overland, from the final port to
the refinery.

Self-propelled barges may be used as such when traveling downstream or upstream in

placid waters; they are operated as an unpowered barge, with the assistance of a
tugboat, when traveling upstream in faster waters. Canal barges are usually made
for the particular canal in which they will operate.

Barges in the United States

Multiple barges pushed around a tight bend on the Cumberland River

In times before industrial development, railways, and highways: barges were the
predominant and most efficient means of inland transportation in many regions. This
holds true today, for many areas of the world.

In such pre-industrialized, or poorly developed infrastructure regions, many barges

are purpose-designed to be powered on waterways by long slender poles – thereby
becoming known on American waterways as poleboats as the extensive west of North
America was settled using the vast tributary river systems of the Mississippi
drainage basin. Poleboats use muscle power of "walkers" along the sides of the
craft pushing a pole against the streambed, canal or lake bottom to move the vessel
where desired. In settling the American west it was generally faster to navigate
downriver from Brownsville, Pennsylvania, to the Ohio River confluence with the
Mississippi and then pole upriver against the current to St. Louis than to travel
overland on the rare primitive dirt roads for many decades after the American
Revolution.

Once the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads reached Chicago, that time
dynamic changed, and American poleboats became less common, relegated to smaller
rivers and more remote streams. On the Mississippi riverine system today, including
that of other sheltered waterways, industrial barge trafficking in bulk raw
materials such as coal, coke, timber, iron ore and other minerals is extremely
common; in the developed world using huge cargo barges that connect in groups and
trains-of-barges in ways that allow cargo volumes and weights considerably greater
than those used by pioneers of modern barge systems and methods in the Victorian
era.

Towboat Herbert P. Brake of New York pushes a new barge east on the Erie Canal in
Fairport, New York, United States
Such barges need to be towed by tugboats or pushed by towboats. Canal barges, towed
by draft animals on a waterway adjacent towpath were of fundamental importance in
the early Industrial Revolution, whose major early engineering projects were
efforts to build viaducts, aqueducts and especially canals to fuel and feed raw
materials to nascent factories in the early industrial takeoff (18th century) and
take their goods to ports and cities for distribution.

The barge and canal system contended favourably with the railways in the early
Industrial Revolution before around the 1850s–1860s; for example, the Erie Canal in
New York state is credited by economic historians with giving the growth boost
needed for New York City to eclipse Philadelphia as America's largest port and city
– but such canal systems with their locks, need for maintenance and dredging, pumps
and sanitary issues were eventually outcompeted in the carriage of high-value items
by the railways due to the higher speed, falling costs and route flexibility of
rail transport. Barge and canal systems were nonetheless of great, perhaps even
primary, economic importance until after the First World War in Europe,
particularly in the more developed nations of the Low Countries, France, Germany
and especially Great Britain which more or less made the system characteristically
its own.

Nowadays, custom built special purpose equipment called modular barges are
extensively used in surveying, mapping, laying and burial of subsea optic fibre
cables worldwide and other support services.

In the United States, deckhands perform the labor and are supervised by a bos'n or
the mate. The captain and pilot steer the towboat, which pushes one or more barges
held together with rigging, collectively called 'the tow'. The crew live aboard the
towboat as it travels along the inland river system or the intracoastal waterways.
These towboats travel between ports and are also called line-haul boats.[18]