The early English settlers of New England and New York were acquainted with the canoe forms of eastern Indians such as the Micmac, Malecite, Abnaki, and the Iroquois. Surviving records, however, show no detailed description of these canoes by an English writer and no illustration until about 1750. At this time a bark canoe, apparently Micmac, was brought from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to England and delivered to Lord Anson who had it placed in the Boat House of the Chatham Dockyard. There it was measured and a scale drawing was made by Admiralty draftsmen; the drawing is now in the Admiralty Collection of Draughts, in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. A redrawing of this plan appears opposite. It probably represents a war canoe, since a narrow, sharp-ended canoe is shown. The bottom, neither flat nor fully round, is a rounded V-shape; this may indicate a canoe intended for coastal waters. Other drawings, of a later date, showing crude plans of canoes, exist in Europe but none yet found appear as carefully drawn as the Admiralty plan, a scale drawing, which seems to be both the earliest and the most accurate 18th-century representation of a tribal type of American Indian bark canoe.
Due to the rapid development of the French fur trade, and the attendant exploration, a great variety of canoe types must have become known to the French by 1750, yet little in the way of drawings and no early scale plans have been found. This is rather surprising, not only because the opportunity for observation existed but also because a canoe factory was actually operated by the French. The memoirs of Colonel Franquet, Military Engineer-in-Chief for New France, contain extensive references to this factory as it existed in 1751.
The canoe factory was located at Trois Rivières, just below Montreal, on the St. Lawrence. A standard large canoe was built, and the rate of production was then 20 a year. Franquet gives as the dimensions of the canoes the following (converted to English measurement): length 36 feet, beam about 5½ feet, and depth about 33 inches. Much of his description is not clear, but it seems evident that the canoe described was very much like the later grand canot, or large canoe, of the fur trade. The date at which this factory was established is unknown; it may have existed as early as 1700, as might have been required by the rapid expansion of the French trade and other activities in the last half of the previous century. It is apparent from early comments that the French found the Indian canoe-builders unreliable, not to say most uncertain, as a source of supply. The need for large canoes for military and trade operations had forced the establishment of such a factory as soon as Europeans could learn how to build the canoes. This would, in fact, have been the only possible solution.
Of course, it must not be assumed that the bark canoes were the only watercraft used by the early French traders. They used plank boats as well, ranging from scows to flat-bottomed bateaux and ship's boats, and they also had some early sailing craft built on the Great Lakes and on the lower St. Lawrence. The bateau, shaped much like a modern dory but with a sharp stern, was adopted by the English settlers as well as the French. In early colonial times this form of boat was called by the English a "battoe," or "Schenectady Boat," and later, an "Albany Boat." It was sharp at both ends, it usually had straight flaring sides with a flat bottom, and was commonly built of white pine plank. Some, however, had rounded sides and lapstrake planking, as shown by a plan of a bateau of 1776 in the Admiralty Collection of Draughts. Early bateaux had about the same range of size as the bark canoes but later ones were larger.
After the English gained control of Canada, the records of the Hudson's Bay Company, and of individual traders and travellers such as Alexander Henry, Jr., and Alexander MacKenzie, at the end of the eighteenth century, give much material on the fur-trade canoes but little on the small Indian canoes. In general, these records show that the fur-trade canoe of the West was commonly 24 feet long inside the gunwales, exclusive of the curves of bow and stern; 4 feet 9 inches beam; 26 inches deep; and light enough to be carried by two men, as MacKenzie recorded, "three or four miles without resting on a good road." But the development of the fur-trade canoes is best left for a later chapter.
The use of the name "canoe" for bark watercraft does not appear to been taken from a North American Indian usage. The early French explorers and travellers called these craft canau (pl. canaux). As this also meant "canal," the name canot (pl. canots) was soon substituted. But some early writers preferred to call the canoe ecorse de bouleau, or birch-bark, and sometimes the name used was merely the generic petit embarcation, or small boat. The early English term was "canoa," later "canoe." The popular uses of canoe, canoa, canau, and canot are thought to have begun early in the sixteenth century as the adaptation of a Carib Indian word for a dugout canoe.
Summary
It will be seen that the early descriptions of the North American bark canoes are generally lacking in exact detail. Yet this scanty information strongly supports the claim that bark canoes were highly developed and that the only influence white men exercised upon their design was related to an increase in size of the large canoes that may have taken place in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The very early recognition of the speed, fine construction, and general adaptability of the bark canoes to wilderness travel sustain this view. The two known instances mentioned of early accurate illustration emphasize that distinct variations in tribal forms of canoes existed, and that these were little changed between early colonial times and a relatively recent period, despite steadily increasing influence of the European.