The building methods of this type of canoe have never been reported. Probably some kind of a rough building frame was used. Perhaps this was comprised of a couple of the battens and the keel piece, weighted with stones. The building bed was probably level. The main gunwale members were apparently made up temporarily and the bark cover shaped and staked out. From that point the work may have followed the usual canoe-building practices except that the ends could not be closed until the framing there was complete, otherwise it would have been impossible to fasten the small ribs in the rams. The structure of these canoes appears to have been almost entirely cedar, except for the bark and lacings which, in some instances, were partly some bark fiber as well as roots. In general, the construction of this class of canoe did not match in quality that of the other bark canoes of the Northwest.
Figure 156
Indians with Canoe at Alert Bay, on Cormorant Island, B.C.
Chapter Seven
ARCTIC SKIN BOATS
Howard I. Chapelle
Among the three primitive watercraft of North America (the others being the dugout and the bark canoe of the American Indians), the Arctic skin boats of the Eskimos are remarkable for effective design and construction obtained under conditions in which building materials are both scarce and limited in selection. The Arctic skin boat is almost entirely to be found in the North American Arctic from Bering Sea to the East Coast of Greenland. In Russian Siberia, only in a small area of the eastern Arctic lands adjacent to the North American continent are any employed.
These craft, an important and necessary factor in the hunting lives of most Eskimo tribal groups, have long attracted the attention of explorers and ethnologists, and many specimens have been deposited in American and European museums. Like bark canoes, they have unfortunately proved difficult to preserve under conditions of museum exhibit. As a result, examples of once numerous types have become so damaged that they no longer give an accurate impression of their original form and appearance, and some have so deteriorated that they have had to be destroyed. Among the latter may have been examples of types long since out of use. One such type was represented by a single kayak, now destroyed; as a result this form has become extinct, and only a poor scale model remains to give a highly unsatisfactory representation of it.
In 1946 the late Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was then projecting his Encyclopedia Arctica, asked me to prepare for it a technical article on the Arctic skin boat. The decision of the sponsors to discontinue the publication, after the first volume had appeared, prevented appearance of the article, but in 1958, through the kindness of Dr. Stefansson, it was returned to the author for publication by the U.S. National Museum. I have since revised and added to it, after receiving criticisms and suggestions from Henry B. Collins, of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, from John Heath, and from other authorities.[2]