Pre-industrial dredging Rosmolens en krabbelaars: baggeren ... - Vssd

22 Het grote baggermolenboek
3 Baggerbeugel.
Dredge bag or hand drag, a leather or woven bag on a long pole
4 Beugelaar
The Dredger; the man who worked with the dredge bag
The Netherlands’ main port in the early Middle
Ages was Dorestad, some 100 miles up the river
Rhine (now Lek) from the sea. While shipbuilding
techniques evolved and ships’ sizes increased,
from, say, the 50 tons flatbottomed clinker built
cog to the 150 tons keel ships of the 16th century,
mariners choose deeper ports closer to the sea,
which in the 17th century made Amsterdam the
Dutch main port, with Rotterdam and Dordrecht
as runners up. Moving further to seaward was
unpractical, but silting became an ever bigger
problem while ships’ sizes continued to increase.
Logical therefore that the 16th century saw the
introduction of more sophisticated dredging
equipment than the hitherto predominant dredge
bag (fig. 3 and 4) (Dutch ‘baggerbeugel’: a leather
bag on a long pole), which even in the 20th century
was still widely used, for instance for relieve work
during the 1930s Great Depression, when many
unemployed people worked for their dole through
maintenance work of canals.
A number of improved dredge bags were
patented, such as the haalschouw by famous