Embarcações a vela do litoral do Estado do Ceará construção, construtores, navegação e aspectos pesqueiros

Abstract

In a worldwide scenario, during the XV Century, the naval building of sail craft underwent an evolutionary development that enabled the undertaking of long-length voyages across the oceans. By arriving at Brazil, an intensive interaction process between local sail boat construction and that of European-derived knowledge. The sail rafts, at first built without sail, were deployed over the whole Brazilian northeast, mainly in Ceará State, as artisanal crafts, evolving from simple dugouts to the actual wooden ones as well as canoes and rowboats. For this research work, the Ceará State’s coast was surveyed from September, 2010 to May, 2012, taking in situ stock of all types of constructed crafts, and pinpointing and interviewing artisanal builders of sailboats, who are than main target population of this survey. To this aim, 36 accomplished carpenters, locally recognized as such, were required to answer a number of questionnaires directed toward a full appraisal of the artisanal naval builders, its professional profile and handicraft, for which photographic records, pictures and sound recordings were obtained. The derived data were transferred to electronic spreadsheets and then analyzed by crosschecking the recorded interviews and the movie pictures. This survey led to the following results: occurrence of low reading ability by the artisanal carpenters so that 44 per cent were found to be illiterate; non-existence of any kind of professional registration by the competent public offices; mean age of 22.1 years; high mean working time and frequency of distribution among the sampled population; factors of influence and origin of learning techniques and absence of functional framing, since they to do not retire as naval builders. Significant results were got as to the artisanal carpenters’s profile in Ceará State, which were deemed quite relevant for the maintenance of the folklore of their techniques applied to the construction of sail crafts, and round up the historic and socioeconomic heritage of the Ceará State’s coastline.