Randall Spackman notes that Hugh Nibley wrote at some length about the features of the Jaredite barges, comparing them to the description of Noah's ark as found in the Sumerian version of the Deluge story from Nippur in lower Mesopotamia, dated to before 3000 B.C. Nibley's analysis, however, relied in part on a questionable reading of a phrase in the Jaredite record describing the watertight nature of the barges at sea as "tight like unto the ark of Noah" (Ether 6:7). Nibley read this as referring to "the submarine nature of Jared's ships" and he concluded that "Jared's boats were built on the same pattern as Noah's ark."
According to Spackman, such a reading is much too broad. The Jaredite barges could have been watertight like Noah's ark, without ever being the same pattern or design, without ever using the same construction methods, and certainly without ever being classified as submarines! Nevertheless, Nibley's review of twelve items of correspondence between the book of Ether and the ancient Sumerian Deluge story does indicate, as Nibley concluded, that Joseph Smith hardly could have invented the story.
The Jaredites would have been familiar with the Deluge story and its similarities to their own situation; so, their earliest records of the barges and the sea voyage may have played upon such similarities. Nonetheless, in order to evaluate the description of the barges in the book of Ether, it might be better to compare the boatbuilding techniques of the ancient Mesopotamians and Chinese with what the Jaredite record actually says about the shape, displacement, size, and tightness of the hull. [Randall P. Spackman, The Jaredite Journey to America, pp. 63-64, unpublished]