88
taking place five or six times in the course of a year. The Yonetsurugawa, the river which proves so troublesome, rises in the district of Kadzunogori in Nambu and flows into the sea on the west coast a little below the town of Tsurugata.
The boats or rather canoes used on this river are of two sizes. It was in the smaller kind that we embarked. Their shape is somewhat peculiar, and a description of them may not be out of place. They are flat-bottomed, long and narrow, the length of the one in which we embarked being about 25 feet, while the breadth was only 212 feet. They lie low in the water, there being hardly a foot of free-board, and the sides are slightly rounded so as to curve inwards. The draught of the smaller boats, such as the one in which we were, I should take to be about six inches. The prow is very long and high, and does not project sharply outwards, as is the case with ordinary Japanese boats, but is continued in a line with the body of the boat in a gradual long curve. The breadth of these canoes is the same all over, except at the bows where they become slightly narrower. They are worked by two boatmen. One of these stands in the stern of the bout and steers with a long paddle; the other either sits in the bow and rows with a very unwieldy paddle fixed in rowlocks made of rope, or else stands up with a pole to ward the canoe off from the rocks and keep it well into the stream. The canoes seem on the whole adapted to the locality and are managed with great skill when shooting the small rapids which occur here and there on the river.
Swinging down with the current at some six miles an hour, we passed through a beautifully undulating country, the scenery being very pretty at times and very picturesque all along. There is a fine view about twelve miles above the village of Tsurugata. Here the hills on each bank rise to a height of 300 or 400 feet, and the stream gradually grows narrower and narrower until at last making a sharp turn to the right it dashes into a steep gorge. From the boat, as it is whirled down amidst the
