The boat he goes in is admirably miscalculated for the service it is built for.

It is handsomely and neatly fitted up, but no man could handle it well in the turbulent currents that sweep down the Bosporus from the Black Sea, and few men could row it satisfactorily even in still water.
It is a long, light canoe (caique,) large at one end and tapering to a knife blade at the other.

They make that long sharp end the bow, and you can imagine how these boiling currents spin it about.

It has two oars, and sometimes four, and no rudder.

You start to go to a given point and you run in fifty different directions before you get there.