 There is an account of the Shila people in the Luapula swamps in the 19th Century hunting hippos with great skill by throwing harpoons at them from dugout canoes, despite being in great danger from these huge aggressive animals’ ability to overturn a canoe and virtually bite its paddlers in half, and they are responsible for many human deaths in Zambia.Several dugout canoes may be lashed together and a timber platform built over them to carry heavy loads, and many early pontoon ferries were made in this way, such as the first ferry over the Luangwa River in 1929, which could carry a 1.5 ton truck.Paddled by a dozen men, the crossing used to take four to six hours, not because of the great width of the river but the need to go a long way upstream before the crossing, when the current would sweep the pontoon several kilometres downstream.