Catamaran
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Catamaran. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a sort of raft. The original catamaran is an invention of the natives of Madras, Ceylon, and other Indian coasts. It consists of three logs lying side by side. The central log is longer and much larger than the two others, and is pointed at the ends. Holes are bored through the logs and all three are stoutly lashed to crosspieces. The logs chosen are light and full of pitch, which prevents their becoming watersoaked. The raft is from twenty to twenty-five or thirty feet long, and perhaps one-fifth as wide. A sail is not infrequently rigged up. The natives use the catamaran as a surf boat . As it cannot tip over or hold water it rides like a duck when other boats would fill and sink. Passengers who do not fear a drenching are conveyed safely to shore or ship through surf that would swamp a boat. The catamaran of American lakes is constructed usually on slender, oblong, water-tight boxes instead of logs. Like any other raft it affords no protection against drenching, but is considered a safe sort of craft for boys who enjoy the water. See Boat
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a kind of boat, vessel, or, more accurately, raft or float used by the Hindoos of Madras, the island of Ceylon, and the parts adjacent. It is formed of three logs of timber, secured together by means of three spreaders and cross lashings through small holes, The central log is much the largest, with a curved surface at the fore-end, which terminates upward in a point. The side logs are very similar in form, but smaller, and with their sides straight; these are fitted to the central log. The length of the whole is from 20 to 25 feet. The crew consists of two men. In the monsoons, where a catamaran is able to bear a sail, a small outrigger is placed at the end of two poles as a balance, with a bamboo mast and yard, and a mat or cotton sail. Frail as such a structure may appear, it can pierce through the surf on the beach at Madras and reach a vessel in the bay when a boat of ordinary construction would be sure to founder.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts define a catamaran as the Tamil log raft of the Madras and Ceylon surf — three lashed logs, "a kind of boat, vessel, or, more accurately, raft or float," as Collier's put it in 1921. The word has since travelled almost entirely away from that meaning: today a catamaran is any twin-hulled vessel, and the type went from novelty to mainstream after Hobie Alter's mass-produced Hobie Cat of the 1960s put beach catamarans in the hands of ordinary sailors. Twin hulls now carry high-speed passenger ferries, and the America's Cup was contested in giant foiling catamarans in 2013 and 2017. Scholars also credit the twin-hull and outrigger idea chiefly to Austronesian seafarers of the Pacific and Indian oceans rather than to a single Indian coastal invention, as Aiton's supposed.
Written for this edition, 2026.