JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This really has nothing to do with Hayao Miyazaki.’s world, though it does look as though it could be part of it—absent the need for and presence of water and imagining the anchor lines as legs. That’s what I see, anyway, in this beautiful plate of a river/port dredger. It is found in the French edition of Corneille Redelyheid’s La noivelle machine a creuser les ports et les rivieres (printed by the author in the Hague in 1774). The document (only 16pp long) describes the vessel and its uses—the engraving shows the scoops/bucket ladders in the middle of the boat—they would gobble up whatever the target was, with the refuse deposited in the two skiffs on either side of the boat. Its a lovely object, and if you close your eyes halfway the vessel takes on a vague absurdist patina, as though it was a massive SomeThing being propelled or skipped about on long excessively skinny legs. I like it.