Canoe question.

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

I'm not at all sure that an open canoe is a sane or sensible choice for open water, but if they are then why can't I think of a traditional craft in Europe which resembles a canoe.

Can you cite an example of anything you would recognise as an open canoe - being traditionally used in open sea conditions in western Europe any time in the last 1500 years - anywhere from Cadiz to Nordkapp.



As a secondary question - any historical examples of true "Offshore" use of open canoes in North America, and if so what size canoe?

[emichaels]

Perhaps you have been to 'Viking Ship Hall' at Bygdoy in Oslo. My book from there shows a plate of the Gokstad ship which, to my untrained eye, looks a lot like a modern (relatively speaking )canoe.

Eric

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

Interesting, but far too big for me to call it a canoe.


The Gokstad ship is clinker-built, constructed largely of oak. The ship is 24 m long and 5 m wide. It is the largest in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. The ship was built to carry 32 oarsmen, and the oar holes could be hatched down when the ship was under sail. It utilized a square sail of c. 110 square meters, which, it is estimated, could propel the ship to over 12 knots. While the ship was traveling in shallow water, the rudder could be raised.

[Hwyl]

http://www.collectionspicturelibrary.com/ee-msm-ir7a8-11.jpg

Go West young man

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

Is that the famous hurling venue version of a canoe - The Curragh?

[Nicholas Scheuer]

The closest thing I've seen from europe that resembles a canoe is an Irish Kaurach (sp?).

Taking an anthropological view, one must go much farther back in European history to find people resembling the indigenous people of nNorth America who use Birchbark canoes.

All of the present day watercraft we call "canoes" are based upon the bark canoe.

Our kayaks, of course are all based on those of the Eskimoes in Greenland and the Arctic.

Moby Nick

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

As a native East Anglian, our duck punts, which are pretty much of canoe dimensions, but heavier, and "flat bottomed" (never actually flat) come in two varieties. Those used in most places are decked, but the ones used on the Stour are un-decked; always have been.

A duck punt is propelled in the following ways:

sailing

rowing

poling

paddling (single paddle, facing forwards)

"setting sticks"

These are used in order of distance from the duck - setting sticks are used to line up for the shot.

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

My interest is in the open water use....

Seens most Curraghs have L/B ratios about 3.5 to 4 which is far too fat for a canoe - but perfectly practical for a G.P. rowing craft.

However I did find this (http://www.michaelbradley.info/books/hotair/hotair1.html) wherein a Canadian proposes sailing along Offa's Dyke.

[Hwyl]

Curragh are skin on frame, they were "portaged". It's likely they were (and still are) paddled. They're still evolving.

You've set your parameters to narrow and are looking to justify your foregone conclusion.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

How "open"?

A mile wide estuary can be quite "open" enough, with wind against tide.

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

How "open"?

A mile wide estuary can be quite "open" enough, with wind against tide.

That's a good question - how about "Further than you can paddle in an hour" as an answer?

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Well, I have thought about it...

...and I conclude that you are right; there is no European craft, used in open water, defined as somewhere further than you can paddle in an hour, that resembles a North American birch bark canoe.

However, I think two points should be considered.

First, the birch bark canoe is one of the lightest traditional boats, and was well suited to the culture that produced it, where travel along large rivers, with portaging over rapids, was commonplace. Such conditions do not obtain in Europe.

Second, I am not sure that many people would be very happy in a canoe, in open water as so defined.

[James McMullen]

I betcha it had something to do with the materials available for boat building in europe vs n. america. A true birchbark canoe is very very light weight compared to anything you can build with european primitive traditional wooden boat building materials. I think there are archaeological finds of heavy dugout paddling craft in europe, but since the performance of a heavy oak rowboat is less degraded by it's weight than an oak canoe type boat would be, perhaps that is why paddling craft lost favor. A punt is quite a bit like a plank-built dugout in a way though, isn't it?

Paddles work great in very small boats, but larger boats do much better with an oar.

[Lance F. Gunderson]

You might be interested in the exploits of Verlin Kruger, who was a passionate canoeist and long distance paddler (single paddle). Kruger designed and built his own canoes.Although he paddled on open ocean, he hated it and it scared him; he much preferred rivers. His exploits are inspiring.

[Canoez]

Big water in an open canoe is scary, particularly when the weather whips up. The Irish boats and Innuit equivalents (Umiaks) as canvas-on-frame and skin-on-frame are some of the more "canoe-ish" open water boats. I still don't think that these were used very far off shore, 'tho.

The longest Curragh voyage was the Brendan, IIRC. You'd have to resort to oral histories for the other.

French Fur trappers in the Canadian woods used the Canot-du-Nord as freighters. They were HUGE, but were mostly used on lakes and rivers. I think they were an adaptation of the existing native boats, tho, and not a European invention.

[Mad Scientist]

As a secondary question - any historical examples of true "Offshore" use of open canoes in North America, and if so what size canoe?


The Mi'kmaq (Micmac) people travelled between Cape Breton and Newfoundland in traditional canoes. That certainly qualifies as 'Offshore'.

A few years ago, they attempted to replicate this feat. IIRC, they had to abandon the attempt.

I'm not sure about the size of the canoe, but I assume that it would have been quite large.

Tom

[Dave Hadfield]

I see three factors involved. The first is a question of bark.

A dead birch on the ground rots from the inside out -- that is, all the wood crumbles away to nothing and leaves the bark shell somewhat intact. You can pick up a section of long-dead birch, shake out the wood, and hold what looks like a large stovepipe in your hands. The intuitive leap to making a boat out of this is not very large. (Slit the middle, pinch the ends and spread the sides apart a bit -- presto, a Boat!) Also the NA native peoples used birchbark for pots and jars and vessels of all kinds. Once again what will keep water IN will obviously keep water OUT.

I suspect that large birches (big ones, 2 ft across or more) may not have been all that common in Europe. I don't know.

Anther thing is topography. The Canadian Shield, where the birchbark canoe triumphed, is in places more water than land. It's a maze of small lakes and rivers and ponds and streams.

I'm a pilot, and when I fly over NW Ontario and look down, it can be hard to determine whether or not I'm looking at lakes in a large land, or islands in a giant lake -- there's that much water (and swamp) to negotiate. Walking isn't easy.

Europe isn't like that. Not so many lakes.

The final influence is land-use. Much of Europe is suitable for farming and stock-raising. When the last glaciation retreated, agriculture was soon invented, and it didn't take that long for Europeans to adopt a settled, fixed-base way of life. They still hunted and fished of course, but tended not to wander. They built villages and defended them. People in that mode of life don't depend on canoes, and are unlikely to have good canoe-birch standing near the village very long.

In NA, the Shield is useless for agriculture and stock raising. It's all spruce and pine and granite and lake. People had to be nomadic to survive. Hence canoes, and GOOD canoes, were of far more value. They were invented, developed, and refined. When the fur traders came, the canoe was perfectly suited to Northern travel, and nothing in the European tool-kit was as good.

Dave

[Thorne]

The question as asked is a bit vague, but I'll give it a shot --

Dugout canoes.

Primitive man's first boat after the raft and reed models, very heavy and hence reasonably stable. Canoe-shaped 'cause the logs are shaped that way, too.

Drake and the boys took their first Spanish warship in the Pacific from indian canoes.

From Wikipedia on the European dugout -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_canoe

De Administrando Imperio details how the Slavs built monoxyla that they sold to Vikings in Kiev.[1] These ships were then used in against Byzantium during the Rus'-Byzantine War of the ninth and tenth centuries. They used dugouts to attack Constantinople and to withdraw into their lands with bewildering speed and mobility. Hence, the name of Δρομίται ("people on the run") applied to the Rus in some Byzantine sources. The monoxyla were often accompanied by larger galleys, that served as command and control centres. Each Slavic dugout could hold from 40 to 70 warriors.

The Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Host were also renowned for their artful use of dugouts, which issued from the Dnieper to raid the shores of the Black Sea in the 16th and 17th centuries. Using small, shallow-draft, and highly manoeuvrable galleys known as chaiky, they moved swiftly across the Black Sea. According to the Cossacks' own records, these vessels, carrying a 50 to 70 man crew, could reach the Anatolian coast of Asia Minor from the mouth of the Dnieper River in forty hours.


Poole Logboat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Poole Logboat made from a single oak tree is over 2,000 years old. It is currently in the Poole Museum.
The Poole Logboat is an ancient logboat made from a single oak tree. It was excavated in the town of Poole, Dorset, England. The boat is over 2,200 years old and is estimated through carbon dating to have been constructed around 300 - 200 BC.[1] The Iron Age vessel was unearthed in 1964 during dredging work in Poole Harbour. The log boat, which could accommodate 18 people and is 10 metres long was based at Green Island in the harbour. After it was found it was kept submerged in water for 30 years while archaeologists decided what to do with it. It was restored by members of York Archaeological Trust and dried for two years. The boat is now on display in the town museum of Poole.[2]

[Pernicious Atavist]

P.I., what do you have in mind? Should we worry?

[Thorne]

LOL!


P.I., what do you have in mind? Should we worry?

[Bruce Hooke]

Lots of good thoughts here, to which I will add a few more:

1. Canoes were used some in open water in North America, for example along the coast of Maine (and on the Great Lakes for that matter), but they are not ideal open water boats. Their virtue is in the fact that they are light enough to be portaged, which has some benefits even on salt water because it makes it easy to haul the boats up above the high tide line overnight, but those benefits don't outweigh the fact that setting out across large stretches of open water in a canoe is a risky undertaking. If you look at the traditional native American routes along the coast of Maine, they made good use of every bit of shelter they could find and much preferred a more sheltered route with a few portages across narrow bits of land to all-water routes that were more exposed.

2. I don't think lack of birchbark has that much to do with it. As someone already noted, the Inuit Umiak is pretty similar to a canoe and is covered with skin, not bark. Also canoes can and were made from other barks, it is just that birchbark works by far and away the best.

3. French Canadian "Batteaus" are relatively canoe-like in shape and were sometimes paddled. As I recall, the history of Batteaus is hard to trace but does almost certainly tie back to Europe. Batteaus tend to be a bit more seaworthy but at the expense of being heavier and much harder to portage. What ultimately sets a traditional canoe apart is that even quite a large canoe can be carried by a very small group of people.

It does seem to me that in North America, where canoes were used on open water it is likely the same boats were being used on rivers, so it was the river use, and the need to portage, that drove the design.

Another factor to keep in mind is that a canoe requires very few tools to build. This is vital in a pre-Columbian society where most tools are made of stone, bone or wood. In Europe, where metal tools have been around for a long time, there were many more options for building much sturdier boats out of all wood, rather than using bark or skin for major parts of the boat.

[Paul Scheuer]

I'm sure that there are many here who know a lot more than I do about birchbark canoes, but just to keep the record straight I'll add what little I do know. Dave Hadfield's "dead birch log" comment may make the intuitive connection, but is somewhat off the mark with the real practice. (how may insect holes would there be in the remains of a rotted-away log in the woods ?)

My understanding is that birchbark canoes were and are made from stitched- together panels, sealed with tar. The bark is taken from live trees in smaller that full cylindrical pieces, and without harm to the trees, and that the bark is actually attached with the inner surface (brown side) of the bark as the outer surface of the boat.

[Todd Bradshaw]

Bark is taken from live trees (sometimes while standing, sometimes after felling) in the largest possible pieces - all the way around if it can be done. If it doesn't kill the tree, it would leave one hell of a scar. I'll probably see Ferdie Goode this weekend, who is one of the top birchbark builders in the US and if I remember I'll ask him, but I suspect that the tree is toast once it's skin is peeled off. Bark is used brown side (inside) out and boats may contain both pieces sewn together and big hunks with gores (triangular darts) cut out and sewn back together to generate the curves needed for the hull. Stitching is root (spruce, jack pine, tamarack) which has been split in half. Obviously, the fewer seams the better, so the number of bark pieces used will depend mostly on the size of the canoe being built. Gunwales (inwales and outwales) are lashed to the skin, sandwiching it, Planking (cedar) is laid inside the skin and pre-bent ribs are forced into the hull and up under the inwale to hold them in place. The gunwale structure is usually capped on top with a wide, thin piece of wood pegged along it's length to the in and outwales and lashed at the ends. The typical pitch for sealing seams is usually a mixture of boiled sap (spruce or pine) and may have charcoal and some animal fat added to temper it. Some pitch used which is golden in color, some is rather reddish brown and some pretty much black. Here is Ferdy Goode's website. Pretty nice boats for "primitive" craft.

http://web.mac.com/beaverbarkcanoes/iWeb/Beaver%20Bark%20Canoes/Beaver%20Bark%20Canoes.html

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Dave Hadfield is correct; large birches are, if not unknown, at least very rare, here. They grow easily enough, but the wood is useless. I doubt if I have seen one over 12" diameter.

[Canoez]

Dave Hadfield is correct; large birches are, if not unknown, at least very rare, here. They grow easily enough, but the wood is useless. I doubt if I have seen one over 12" diameter.

As you can note from Todd's post, the only contribution of the birch tree is the bark, not the wood. The ribs and planking are typically cedar.

If you've never seen a birch bark canoe built, it's a bit backwards from a wood/canvas hull. They start with the bark and build the woodwork into it as opposed building the ribs and planking and then covering over the thing with canvas. Interesting to see, however.

[Three Cedars]

There is the Viking Arby "canoe" at about 13ft long by 40" wide. http://www.algonet.se/~gwarner/canoe.htm

Europeans used dugouts extensively on inland waters , they are very canoe-like. http://www.qnet.fi/rus-project/Estonia.html

They also used large seaworthy sewn plank boats which were paddled. http://www.foteviken.se/sewnboat/hjortspring.html and http://home6.inet.tele.dk/hjortspr/index_en.htm

good book here ,Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times
By Sean McGrail

the original secondary question : can't forget tribes in the PNW who used large canoes offshore for hunting and raiding.

[Thorne]

Well, a dugout canoe IS a canoe -- and is probably the original canoe!

I think the initial question has been answered -=- from the stone age onwards, dugout canoes were used offshore and for long trips.

The Wikipedia link in my previous post talks about dugout canoes large enough for 70 warriors crossing the Black Sea in the 16th and 17th C's, and the prehistoric large dugout canoes probably saw service wherever the ancient mariners wanted to go.

[Dave Hadfield]

They're different things. One is light and the other isn't. You can make a birchbark canoe quickly in the right circumstances. In Samuel Hearne's 179(5?) book, when he became the first European to walk to the Arctic coast (Coppermine River), he travelled with a native group. They would abandon their canoes, walk their route across the tundra, then later return in a different spot, make more, and return to their winter quarters.

You can't just whip-up a light canoe out of a 5 ft standing oak. Nor can you make one quickly out of skins, unless you're very lucky in your source of supply. (Curraughs were made with oak bark tanned oxhides.) But you can probably depend on a birch tree being available later, with bark that can be peeled in a few hours, barring fire or someone else using it. Making 4 or 5 canoes, with a group of 15-20 people (men cutting bark and splitting cedar, women gathering black spruce root for splitting and stitching) took only a few days.

And all bark canoe builders search at some great length for a good tree to start with. Sure, they expect to do some sewing-together of pieces, but they want a straight clean trunk, no branches for the first 18 ft or so, and about 2 ft across as a minimum. Too much piecework otherwise.

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

I have never seen a birch tree of those dimensions in Europe. Our two common birches are betula pendula and b. pubescens; both very similar.

There is probably some very good reason why our birches don't get to "canoe" size; it may equaly be that our forebears never had the idea of making a birch bark canoe.

[Bruce Hooke]

If this picture of the bark of betula pendula shows what the bark typically does as the tree gets larger then even if a tree of suitable size could be found, I don't think this bark would be suitable because of how it gets "broken up."

http://www.fowa.org.uk/holf66/images/h66_img_3.jpg

from http://www.fowa.org.uk/holf66/holf66.htm

It should be noted that these days even here in New England, birch trees of a size and condition suitable for making a birchbark canoe are very rare.

This picture shows what Paper Birch bark looks like. This example is, of course, nowhere near canoe size, but it does show how the bark behaves on a decent size birch tree.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Brzoza_paierowa_Betula_papyrifera.jpg

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_birch

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

The birches we get in the UK are a smallish tree and often found as a scrubby pioneer plant- the largest one we had in the garden when I was a kid was about 18 inches in diameter, about 50 years old and not destined to get much older.

The bark looks a little like the paper bark but not as clear.

You can tap them for sap in the spring. The timber, it you get it before the fungi, can be outstandingly well figured - I've seen quilt and ripple.

[Bruce Taylor]

Algonquin canoe-building, about an hour up the river from my place:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/video-canoe.htm

In this case at least, the bark is taken from a downed tree:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/peeling-barkcropped.jpg

White side in, as noted above:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/jockolayingoutbark.jpg

The boat takes shape in an exterior mould, made of posts driven into the ground.

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/basil-sewingcanoe.jpg

This one was planked on the inside (rather like the familiar cedar-canvas canoe).

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/splitting-cedar.jpg

[dredbob]

I'm certainly not an expert on native craft, but I have to back Thorne on this. The birch bark canoe was used only in the northeast corner of North America. Throughout the rest of the continent, by far the most common canoe was the dugout. This is not to say that bark canoes were never paddled outside of this area, but they were not built, for the simple fact that the suitable bark was not to be found.

I don't remember the names of the tribes, but there were whaling/sea fishing tribes on both coasts who used large dugouts.

Bob

[Three Cedars]

refering to Adney + Chapelle The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America . Birch bark canoes were made in all the western provinces , NWT , Yukon and Alaska for a very long time.. The birch used was not the primo bark used in the east but was from smaller trees so it was pieced together

Nice article on the building of a Dogrib birchbark canoe here http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic51-1-75.pdf the article mentions a beam of 41 cm which is incorrect 61 -71 is what they averaged for the solo type.

[Canoez]

Bump - A really nice post.


Algonquin canoe-building, about an hour up the river from my place:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/video-canoe.htm

In this case at least, the bark is taken from a downed tree:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/peeling-barkcropped.jpg

White side in, as noted above:

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/jockolayingoutbark.jpg

The boat takes shape in an exterior mould, made of posts driven into the ground.

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/basil-sewingcanoe.jpg

This one was planked on the inside (rather like the familiar cedar-canvas canoe).

http://www.birchbarkcanoe.net/images/splitting-cedar.jpg