Coffee boat
The Kaffenkahn is a historic barge with a special design. This type of ship was most widespread between the 17th and 19th centuries on the waters between the Elbe and the Vistula in the Prussian provinces .
Design
A coffee boat was a wooden barge with the floor planks bent up over the waterline . The side planks were placed against it, whereby a beak-like, high-rising point was formed from the two upper, thick side planks. This front and rear end of the boat is called a coffee ( front coffee , rear coffee ). These tips, some of which are very long, were used, among other things, as jewelry and as an aid to inland navigation when steering the boat. The forestay (tensioning rope) of the mast was attached to this coffee beak, which was girded with metal straps. It was also used to secure the anchor. The plank thickness could be up to 10 cm, depending on the size of the ship. After 1840, the floor planks of most of the boats were no longer bent. The front and rear of the ship are terminated by sloping coulter pieces (Kaffe planks) in the form of a triangular plate, butt against the floor planks. The so-called coffee beak rose even more steeply in this new construction. With the mast down, this component formed the highest fixed point of the ship. Since there was damage to bridges and locks, this height was officially set at 2.80 m above the empty depth. Later on, the front coffee on many ships was built to be foldable (cut coffee). The rear coffee was lower. The nail socket for the suspension of the oar went through it . The sail mast was in the front third of the coffee boat. He was unstayed on the side . He was held by a wooden frame, the shear stick . In relation to the size of the ship, the mast was very high. The masts could not be laid or set (pierced) without outside help. Almost all bridges at that time had mast passages or were bascule bridges. The sails were trapezoidal.
Favored by the simple shape of the ship, the Kaffe construction was widespread very early on. Such vehicles already existed in the 12th century. Representations of seals from the Middle Ages show river ships whose coffins were tied with additional ropes. This held the planks together at the ends of the ship and dampened the ship's movements. For simple inland waterway vessels, the construction of the coffees was still common until the 19th century. The last commercial coffee barges were built on the Uecker , the Märkische Wasserstraßen and the Vltava in Bohemia (Bohemian Zille) by 1914 . Of the latter, the wreck lifted off the island of Eiswerder in the Havel in 1987 exists in the permanent exhibition of the German Museum of Technology in Berlin .
However, the design is not completely extinct. In southern Germany and Austria there are still smaller variants such as the punt in Tübingen or the Sport-Zillen in Austria.
Ship sizes
Around 1710 ships with a capacity of 10 to 15 tons were common. In comparison with the possibility of transporting a horse-drawn vehicle, this was an economic factor. With the commissioning of the Finow Canal around 1750, the barges reached a load capacity of up to 50 tons. A hundred years later there were barges with a load capacity of up to 150 tons. The largest coffee barges at the end of the 19th century were the Groß-Finow-Maß barges, which operated on the Oder and Havel, with a length of 42 m and a width of 5 m, and the Elbe barges with a length of up to 50 m and a load capacity of 250 t.
Different names
All ships were previously referred to as vessels in official documents. They were calibrated and their capacity could be determined based on the draft. Colloquially there were very different names for the ships of that time. So they were called Zille , Kahn , Schute , Prahm , Nachen, Jagd, Arche, Gelle, Jölle, Spitzbock, Oderkahn or Butzer.
literature
- Günter Pohlandt: Berlin was built out of a boat . Magazine Modellbau-heute 1/87, military publishing house of the GDR, Berlin 1987.
- Alfred Dudszus, Alfred Köpcke, Friedrich Krumrey: The great book of ship types . Steam ships, motor ships, marine technology: from the beginnings of machine-driven ships to the present day. Transpress, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-344-00374-7 , new edition: Pietsch, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-613-50391-3 .
- Herbert Stertz: Havel shipping under sail . From the fur boat to the chat boat. Media @ Vice, Pritzwalk 2005, ISBN 3-00-016065-5 .
- Michael Sohn: Coffee boats . A bygone form of barge. Self-published by Sohn-Art, Hennigsdorf 2013, ISBN 978-3-00-041659-0 .
- Max Rehberg: How a wooden Havel barge was made . Heimat und Welt magazine 83/1933.
- Jenny Sarrazin, Andre van Holk: Schopper und Zillen, An introduction to traditional wooden shipbuilding in the German Danube area . Ernst Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-8225-0334-7 .
Web links
- Homepage of the Kaffenkahn EV accessed on November 7, 2013
- Coffee barge CONCORDIA Fürstenberg called on November 7, 2013
- Homepage Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin accessed on November 7, 2013