At the beginning of a documentary on rowing (“The Drive”) available on YouTube, Peter Mallory makes much of the claim that almost alone among modern sports, rowing began as hard work, as slave labor and as the bluest of blue-collar occupations. Consider rowers impressed to propel Greek triremes, but mostly consider the watermen of the Thames, competing for cargo and passengers with speed and capacity. Other sports began, says Mallory, largely as childrens’ games: run, throw the ball, catch the ball. Archery and marksmanship might be exceptions, but they have their affinities with rowing, too, and to pursue these “counter examples” too closely might be to find more support than criticism of Mallory’s claim: they, like rowing, began as serious business, and their expert practicioners dwell on nuance and detail with the same sort of obsessive attention.

The labor of watermen became the sport of Eton, and when Eton’s children went on to Oxford and Cambridge, they took their boats with them. Other schools, pretenders to Oxford and Cambridge (to hear Oxford and Cambridge tell it), took up the oar and the scull. And there you have competitive collegiate rowing by the first decades of the 18th century.

In 1870, approximately, rowing had its Zephram Cochrane moment: the invention of the sliding seat, the warp drive of oar-propelled watercraft. Forever after, the small muscles of the arms and shoulders did not power fast boats; the quads and glutes and the backs of rowers did. At a stroke, so to speak, the power available to rowed watercraft increased several fold.

The urge to go faster and faster made competitive versions of the rowed craft that once carried passengers and cargo thinner and longer until they were unstable, all-but-weightless needles up to thirty feet long with barely enough displacement to float their pilots. A modern racing shell might be one foot wide; the sliding seat is not in the boat but on it, and the outside curves of the rower’s butt overhang water.

Trainers and recreational shells are not quite so elongate. The boat I am building in the basement has a 20-foot waterline and a beam of 18-19 inches. It is rocket ship compared to a punt, but it is a slug compared to a racing shell. It will do.