The Fuegian canoe has been described by Wilkes, Pritchard, and others. It is sewn with shreds of whalebone, sealskin, and twigs, and supported by a number of stretchers lashed to the gunwale; the joints are stopped with rushes, and, without, smeared with resin. In Guiana the canoe is made of the bark of the purple-heart tree, stripped off and tied together at the ends. The ends are stopped with clay, as with the Australians. This mode of caulking is not very effectual, however, and the water is sure to come in sooner or later.
The nature of the material does not admit of much variety in the construction; suffice it to say that it is in general use in North America, up to the Esquimaux frontier. Its value in these regions consists in the facility with which it is taken out of the water and carried over the numerous rapids that prevail in the North American rivers. The Algonquins were famous for the construction of them. Some carry only two people, but the canot de maître was thirty-six feet in length, and required fourteen paddlers. Kalm, in 1747, gives a detailed account of the construction of them on the Hudson river, and Lahontan, in 1684, gives an equally detailed description of those used in Canada. The bark is peeled off the tree by means of hot water. They are very fragile, and every day some hole in the bottom has to be stopped with gum.
Mr. T. G. B. Lloyd, in an excellent paper descriptive of the Beothucs of Newfoundland, published in Journ. Anthrop. Inst. (vol. iv. pp. 26-8), has described the remarkable bark canoe of these people. Its form is different from any other canoe of this or any other region that I have heard of, the line of the gunwale rising in the middle, as well as at the ends, and the vessel being V-shaped in section, with a straight wooden keel at the bottom. Its form is so singular, that the only idea of continuity which I can set up for it is, that it must have been copied from some European child’s paper boat, capable, by a single additional fold, of being converted into a cocked hat; the central pyramidal portion of the paper boat having given the form to the pyramidal sides of the Beothuc vessel. If this be rejected, then its history has yet to be told, for no native tribe ever employed such a peculiar form unless by inheritance.
Nos. 1248 and 1249 of my collection are South American bark canoes; Nos. 1250 to 1252 are bark canoes from North America.
4. Canoes of Wicker and Skin.
As we approach the Arctic regions, the dug-out and bark canoes are replaced by canoes of skin and wicker. As we have already seen, in the case of the bow, and other arts of savages, vegetable materials supply the wants of man in southern and equatorial regions, whilst animal materials supply their place in the north.
The origin of skin coverings has been already suggested when speaking of bark canoes. The accidental dropping of a skin bottle into the water might suggest the use of such vessels as a means of recovering the harpoon, which, as I have already shown elsewhere, was almost universally used for fishing in the earliest stages of culture. The Esquimaux lives with the harpoon and its attached bladder almost continually by his side. The Esquimaux kayak, Nos. 1253 and 1254 of my collection, in which he traverses the ocean, although admirable in its workmanship, and, like all the works of the Esquimaux, ingenious in construction, is in principle nothing more than a large, pointed bladder, similar to that which is lashed to the harpoon at its side; the man in this case occupying the opening which, in the bladder, is filled by the wooden pin that serves for a cork.
This is, I believe, a very primitive form of vessel, although there can be no doubt that many links in the history of its development have been lost. Unlike the dug-out canoe, such a fragile contrivance as the wicker canoe perishes quickly, and no direct evidence of its ancestry can be traced at the present time. It is only by means of survivals that we can build up the past history of its development; and these are, for the most part, wanting.