Adney's papers and drawings dealing with the construction of bark canoes are most complete and valuable. So complete as to be almost a set of "how-to-do-it" instructions, they cover everything from the selection of materials and use of tools to the art of shaping and building the canoe. An understanding of these building instructions is essential to any sound examination of the bark canoes of North America, for they show the limitations of the medium and indicate what was and what was not reasonable to expect from the finished product.
In working on Adney's papers, it became obvious that this publication could not be limited to birch-bark canoes, since canoes built of other barks and even some covered with skins appear in the birch bark areas. Because of this, and to explain the technical differences between these and the birch canoes, skin-covered canoes have been included. I have also appended a chapter on Eskimo skin boats and kayaks. This material I had originally prepared for inclusion in the Encyclopedia Arctica, publication of which was cancelled after one volume had appeared. As a result, the present work now covers the native craft, exclusive of dugouts, of all North America north of Mexico.
In my opinion the value of the information gathered by Edwin Tappan Adney is well worth the effort that has been expended to bring it to its present form, and any merit that attaches to it belongs largely to Adney himself, whose long and painstaking research, carried on under severe personal difficulties, is the foundation of this study.
Howard Irving Chapelle Curator of Transportation, Museum of History and Technology
Chapter One
EARLY HISTORY
The development of bark canoes in North America before the arrival of the white men cannot satisfactorily be traced. Unlike the dugout, the bark canoe is too perishable to survive in recognizable form buried in a bog or submerged in water, so we have little or no visual evidence of very great age upon which to base sound assumptions.
Records of bark canoes, contained in the reports of the early white explorers of North America, are woefully lacking in detail, but they at least give grounds for believing that the bark canoes even then were highly developed, and were the product of a very long period of existence and improvement prior to the first appearance of Europeans.
The Europeans were most impressed by the fact that the canoes were built of bark reinforced by a light wooden frame. The speed with which they could be propelled by the Indians also caused amazement, as did their light weight and marked strength, combined with a great load-carrying capacity in shallow water. It is remarkable, however, that although bark canoes apparently aroused so much admiration among Europeans, so little of accurate and complete information appears in their writings.