 The dugout then took over as the principal means of fishing and travel by boat, whether paddled in deeper water, or punted in shallow water like makoros in neighbouring Botswana.When explorer David Livingstone, the first European to see Lake Bangweulu arrived on the western shore of that lake in 1868, he was conveyed across it efficiently in a dugout canoe 45 feet long and 4 feet wide (about 14 m by 1.2 m), paddled by six men.The people of the lake and its wetlands, which cover a completely flat area of more than 10,000 km² in flood, have the ability to navigate unaided across open water or through mazes of swamp channels despite having no landmarks to guide them most of the time.