Navigable by boats.
1683. The Schuylkill being an hundred miles boatable below the falls.—W. Penn, ‘Descr. of Pennsylvania.’ (N.E.D.)
1786. The phrase “boatable waters” occurs in chap. ii. of the ‘Constitution of Vermont.’ (Bartlett.)
1796. General Cleveland explored the river Cuyahoga, which was boatable.—Mass. Spy, Nov. 30.
1805. It [the Hockhocking] is boatable about seventy-five miles.—Thaddeus M. Harris, ‘State of Ohio,’ p. 109.
1826. We were almost daily passing the mouths of boatable streams, which furnish lateral canals, some of them hundreds of miles in extent, into the interior, on which every year new towns and villages were springing up, and pouring the products of cultivation into the Ohio.—T. Flint, ‘Recollections,’ p. 22.
1830. It loses its precipitous character and foamy whiteness, and is a calm and boatable stream, quite to its recesses in the Rocky Mountains, where a hundred mountain streams and cascades rush down, and unite with it from every side.—T. Flint, ‘The Shoshonee Valley,’ i. 95 (Cincinnati).
