Noah, the first shipbuilder of Biblical record, was commanded to make an ark of "gopher wood" and to coat it inside and out with pitch (Genesis 6:14-16). According to Randall Spackman, pitch is also mentioned as material for coating boat hulls in documents from the 3rd Dynasty of Ur, about 2000 B.C., and it is clear from Mesopotamian records during the 2nd millennium B.C., that it was standard practice in Jared's Babylonia to coat the outside of the vessel with pitch and the inside of the planks with fish oil. In northern China, however, the ancient waterproofing technique was to coat the hulls with tung oil, sometimes mixed with fish oil or lime, a practice which one early European traveller noted "suffereth no wormes, which is the occasion that one of their shippes doth twice last out one of ours."
Thus, the use of pitch, fish oil or tung oil for waterproofing and protection from worms may have been comprehended in the words "tight like unto a dish" (Ether 2:17). [Randall P. Spackman, The Jaredite Journey to America, pp. 79-80, unpublished]