Lars used to work on a tanker that brought oil from the Persian Gulf. When he went ashore there, he saw boats just like the earliest ones that men invented thousands of years ago. He saw boats that were really big, round clay pots, built by people in places where there was plenty of clay but very little wood. He saw huge basket boats woven from a kind of grass and waterproofed with a covering of tar. Some of the basket boats were big enough to carry twenty passengers--or several men and three horses! [Illustration: A Quffa on the Tigris] [Illustration: Raft of Timber and Inflated Skins Discharging Grain at Bagdad. Small quffas Serve as Lighters.] Smaller basket boats were used as lighters. (A lighter is any craft that helps to unload freight from another.) Here on the Tigris River, the freight was carried on a large raft supported by animal skins blown up like balloons. A little raft floating downstream sometimes carried its owner, his donkey and the grain he had to sell. After selling the grain, the boatman took the skins from under the raft, let the air out, piled them on the donkey’s back and walked back home upriver. Out at sea, whenever Lars sees a life raft on the top deck, he realizes it is just like the skin-float rafts he saw on the Tigris River. Instead of blown-up skins, water-tight metal containers filled with air hold the life raft up. When Lars puts on his life jacket for lifeboat drill, he is getting ready to use a float, just the way people long ago used bundles of reeds. Even though men have learned so much about ships in all the years since they first started to travel on water, they still use some of the first knowledge they ever acquired. All of these things interest Lars. He grew up by the sea in Norway, and his people have been seamen since the days of the Vikings. But best of all he likes the clean, modern, comfortable tankers. He is not only going somewhere himself when he is on a tanker. He is also helping to carry a cargo that helps other people to go places. [Illustration: Life raft] [Illustration: Life ring] [Illustration] SEATRAINS Lars’s tanker was built to do a very special kind of job. So were many other kinds of ships. Look at the Seatrain, which carries fully loaded freight cars--a hundred of them at a time. To load a Seatrain, the railroad locomotive pushes a string of cars out onto a long pier. A derrick lifts the cars up one by one, swings them over an open hatch, and lowers them neatly onto tracks in the ship’s hold. After the holds are filled, there’s still room for more cars on the main deck outside. It seems queer for trains to travel by ship, but sometimes that’s the best way to send cargo. Freight cars can be filled with sugar on the island of Cuba and brought across the water to the United States, without any extra loading and unloading. It’s often cheaper for freight cars to go by ship than by rail from New York to Savannah or New Orleans or Texas City. [Illustration] BANANA BOATS