For the curious who want to know the secret of bottled boats, here is a short video of 3 minutes 45, made by the association Le Moulin à images for the magazine Chemins de traverse. It presents Roger Connan, passionate about navibotellism, who reveals the mysteries of this technique.
The beginnings of navibotellism
The development of this technique, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, is due to the sailors of the long-distance ships. Taking advantage of the more numerous moments of freedom during long journeys through the capes, the so-called cap-horners began to reproduce boats before introducing them inside old bottles.
Captain Jean Jourdan writes in his book, Souvenir d'un vieux marin, that " most of the sailors who sailed were tinkerers. Each one had his own speciality: for some it was boats in bottles, for others models or rods made with the vertebrae of a shark, or objects made with bones or albatross beaks ".
The lighthouse keepers also shared this know-how, sometimes using the broken bulbs of the lighthouse as containers.
The technique in 9 steps
Making a boat in a bottle is a delicate matter. To get started, you must follow several steps carefully:
- The choice of the bottle
- The tooling
- The choice of the boat model
- The realization of the hull
- The making of the mast
- The finishes
- The assembly of the rigging
- The realization of the sea and the base
- Bottling
Bottle modelling still alive
Enthusiasts still keep this art alive and pass on their know-how in associations and workshops. A lot of information is available for example from the Association Bateaux en Bouteilles, or ABB Rose des vents, which also publishes a quarterly newsletter. To learn how to sail on your own, there are also kits available for about 35 euros.
