From a young age, Royal Navy officer Peter Halkett (1820-55) was interested in exploring the more remote regions of Canada, where the terrain was rough and there were always stretches of water to be crossed.

Halkett was partly spurred on to invent his ‘boat-cloak’ (or ‘cloak-boat’) by accounts of Sir John Franklin’s Coppermine Expedition of 1819-22, which charted part of the north coast of Canada.

Eleven of Franklin’s party of 20 men died during the expedition, and the survivors were reduced to eating lichen, their own boots and (it was alleged) their dead comrades.

A major problem faced by the explorers was the large number of rivers that could be crossed only with great difficulty.

Halkett’s solution was to invent a portable boat that could be worn as clothing by one person. It comprised a waterproof cloak made of rubber-impregnated doth, its lining containing an oval-shaped airtight compartment split into sections in case of puncture.

The kit also included a paddle, small bellows for inflating the boat, a walking stick that doubled up as the paddle shaft, and an umbrella to double as the boat’s sail.

Halkett’s original version could be converted from cloak to boat with just a few minutes’ inflating and, it was claimed, carried up to eight people.

The Admiralty commended Halkett’s ingenuity but concluded that his invention had only limited uses. It was, though, employed by a number of expeditions, particularly in Canada.

Halkett’s invention was displayed in the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it was praised by explorers in newspaper reports, as well as at demonstrations in Britain. One 1850 trial on the Serpentine concluded that: “It is instantly available, and can, in cases of necessity, be converted into an excellent bed.”

Though the boat-cloak might appear to be one of many typically wacky 19th-century inventions, it did work – but was never a commercial success.