The Dimensions of the Cossack Boat “Chaika” Trace Back to a Single Book

The boat in which Zaporizhian Cossacks rowed down the Dnipro River and out to the Black Sea is known in Ukrainian as the “chaika” (чайка). Length 18–20 meters, crew of 50 to 60, rudders at both ends — that is what the encyclopedias say.

Trace these dimensions back, however, and much of it leads to a single book by a 17th-century French engineer. And that book does not even call the boat a “chaika.” This article looks at how the boat was built and where its numbers come from, how the name changed over time, and what is made of boats raised from the Dnipro River.

Beauplan’s “Description of Ukraine”

The book’s author is Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian History (compiled by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Institute of History, hereafter “the Institute’s encyclopedia”), Beauplan was a military engineer and cartographer born around 1600 in Dieppe, France, and died on December 6, 1673. From the end of 1630 until 1648 he served the Polish king, building fortresses and castles mainly in Ukrainian territory, including at Kremenchuk and Kodak. In 1639, he produced the first map of Ukraine based on his own surveys.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU) from the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta, the book written as a commentary on the map first appeared in 1651, and an expanded edition, Description d’Ukranie, was published in Rouen in 1660. English (1704), German (1780), Polish (1822), and Russian (1832) translations followed; an annotated Ukrainian edition appeared in Kyiv in 1990, and an English edition from Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute in 1993.

Beauplan had joined the army suppressing a Cossack rebellion in 1637–1638 (IEU, the Institute’s encyclopedia). This is worth keeping in mind when reading his account: he saw the Cossacks from the outside, and as an opponent he had fought.

How Beauplan Described the Boat’s Construction

The French text of the 1660 edition (Ukrainian translation by Kravets and Borysiuk, 1990) states that, before heading out to sea, the Cossacks built a boat like this at their gathering place.

• About 60 pieds long, 10–12 pieds wide, 12 pieds deep. The pied was a unit of length used in France at the time
• No keel. A dugout hull of willow or linden about 45 pieds long serves as the base, and planks about 10–12 pieds long and 1 pied wide are nailed on in overlapping courses, as with a river boat, widening as they go up
• A bundle of reeds as thick as a barrel is tied along the gunwale from end to end. Even if water gets in, this bundle of reeds keeps the boat from sinking
• One rudder at each end, so that time is not wasted turning the boat around when fleeing, given its length
• 10–15 oars on each side, faster than a Turkish galley. A single mast, with a sail used only in calm weather. No deck

It further states that one boat was built by 60 men and finished in two weeks, that 80 to 100 boats would be ready in two to three weeks, that each boat carried 50 to 70 men, each armed with two guns and a saber, and that the boats carried four to six small cannon (falconets).

Comparing the Dimensions

Where Do the Numbers Come From?

The IEU entry is brief, closing after giving the dimensions with the statement that “Beauplan left an accurate description of the chaika.” IEU does not name the source of its dimensions, but Beauplan is the only person the entry names, and features such as the rudder at each end, the bundle of reeds along the gunwale, and the mast overlap with his account. This suggests many of the encyclopedia’s figures rest on that single book by Beauplan.

The Institute’s encyclopedia, citing “written sources,” gives a length of 15–22 meters and a width of 4–6 meters — wider than Beauplan’s figures. It also notes that the construction, size, and armament could have varied over the centuries. On the role of the reed bundle, it likewise cites “various sources” for three explanations: stabilizing an unsteady boat (Beauplan’s explanation), improving buoyancy, and dazzling the enemy in battle.

Whose Name Is “Chaika”?

The Old Name, and the Current Name

Beauplan’s French text calls the boat a “basteau” (boat). The Ukrainian translation renders this as “човен” (boat), and the word “chaika” does not appear at all.

According to the Institute’s encyclopedia, a word equivalent to “chaika” was widely used around the Mediterranean from the late medieval to the early modern period, referring to small boats handled by armed crews — the Turkish şayka, Romanian saica, Italian saicca, German tschaike, and so on. The same encyclopedia explains that 19th- and 20th-century Ukrainian historians, drawing on references in the Polish Bielski chronicle and the writings of Daskol, came to call the Cossacks’ 16th–18th-century fighting boats “chaika.”

“Chaika” is now the very headword under which encyclopedias list it, but in Beauplan’s own French account of his time, it was simply a “boat.”

Expeditions to the Black Sea

In these boats, Cossacks descended the Dnipro and raided towns across the Black Sea. IEU’s entry “Black Sea” states that, especially between 1589 and 1621, Cossacks went on the offensive, raiding Tatar and Turkish coastal towns with their light boats (chaika) — Yevpatoria, Sinop, Trabzon, Akkerman at the mouth of the Danube (today’s Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi), Kiliia, and Izmail — and even ravaging the outskirts of Constantinople.

Beauplan also left an account of the logistics of these expeditions. The Cossacks would set out after the feast of St. John and return by early August at the latest; because Turkish galleys waited at the mouth of the Dnipro, they left on a dark night just before the new moon, hiding in reed beds the galleys could not enter; from there it took 36 to 40 hours to reach the Anatolian coast (the Asian side of today’s Turkey). On the way back, he writes, they used a route east of Ochakiv where they would haul the boats onto land and drag them to the Dnipro, or a route entering the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait and returning to the Dnipro via the Miius and Samara rivers. The same book also records that many men and boats were lost in battle.

The Dnipro’s rapids and the Sich built downstream of them are covered in the article on the Dnipro’s six dams and the article on the 220 years from the Sich’s founding to its destruction.

Are the Boats Raised from the Dnipro Chaikas?

Around Khortytsia Island in Zaporizhzhia, old boats have been raised from the riverbed. According to the National Reserve “Khortytsia,” during the Russo-Turkish War of 1736–1739 the Russian fleet’s boats could not clear the Dnipro’s rapids to reach the Black Sea and were sunk near the shores of Khortytsia. Since 1999, these boats have been raised from the riverbed, and the reserve lists items such as “Cossack boats of 1736–1739,” a “1737 Dnipro dubel-shliupka,” and “brigantines of 1736–1739” as 18th-century military vessels. The reserve states that the building housing the boats also serves as a restoration workshop and does not yet have formal status as a museum.

The Institute’s encyclopedia’s entry “Chaika” (2013), on the other hand, states that “to this day, not a single chaika has been positively identified as Cossack.” Kobaliia, who wrote this entry, co-authored a book in 2005 titled “The ‘Zaporizhian Chaika’: The Story of a Discovery” (per the entry’s bibliography).

The boats the reserve describes date from the 18th-century Russo-Turkish War, a different era from the early-17th-century chaika Beauplan depicted. Whether the raised boats can be called “chaikas” cannot be settled from these two sources.