Ship camel

The increased displaced volume provided by the camels allows the system to float at a reduced draught.

In April, he tested the device with the large ship of the line Princess Maria, which was sailed over the shallow waters of Pampus in the Zuiderzee.

The camel was mostly used in the Dutch Golden Age for accessing the shallow waters at Pampus, which were unreachable for large merchant ships.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the difficulties of getting stuck in the Zuiderzee led to a canal being built through Waterland (an area of North Holland) and Marken.

[1] In C. S. Forester's 1945 novel The Commodore, set in 1812, one of the vessels under the command of Horatio Hornblower uses camels to reduce its draught during bombardment of French troops besieging Riga in the Baltic Sea.