Logboat Building in Estonia

Historic photo of a woman delivering milk to the local dairy in a haabjas. (Source).

Logboats remained in common use in Estonia later than anywhere else in Europe. One of their last holdouts was in the country's Soomaa region, a vast wetland notable for its "fifth season", the spring period of ice-melt during which much of the land floods and almost all movement is constrained to watercraft. In the 1960s, however, the Estonian logboat -- called the haabjas -- finally succumbed to the modernization of society and essentially disappeared from practical economic applications. The craft of logboat building was no longer passed from father to son as it had been for generations and was retained only by an aging and steadily shrinking cohort of traditional builders. Some older boats remained in use, however, treasured by their owners and used mainly on special occasions.

Logboats at the Haabjas heritage center in Tori, Estonia.

Enter Aivar Ruukel, a nature guide who lives in the Soomaa. Concerned for the heritage of the haabjas, he began studying their design and construction, interviewing and working with some of the few remaining builders, documenting the process, and learning how to build them himself. Along the way, he encouraged others to join him in working to preserve the heritage of the Estonian logboat, founding a haabjas heritage center in the village of Tori, close to the Soomaa National Park, and campaigning to have the haabjas inscribed on UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, at which effort he succeeded in 2021.

Ruukel also began running annual haabjas building workshops, which I wrote about in 2008, this blog's first year of publication. Ruukel quickly noticed the post, contacted me to clarify a technical point on which I was unclear, and we remained in sporadic touch until 2023, when we finally met in person at the first Early Watercraft Association Congress in Vila do Conde, Portugal. There, he invited me and Swiss watercraft scholar Béat Arnold to visit Estonia for a future workshop. I had that opportunity last month and was delighted to see Béat there too.

Laying out the logboat on a big aspen log.

It was a fascinating, exciting, and at the same time low-key, affair. Over the course of five days, about 17 men and women worked to build a haabjas under the guidance of Ruukel's friend, master builder Jaan Keerdo. The building site was on the Pärnu River, next to the haabjas heritage center in the tiny, neat village of Tori. Ruukel had previously felled and transported to the site a large aspen trunk, so after introductions and preliminaries, the crew began the construction process by stripping its bark with shovels, axes, and a drawknife.

Master builder Jaan Keerdo (left) and haabjas heritage champion Aivar Ruukel.

Over the next few days, Keerdo directed the work of laying out the main interior and exterior cuts and demonstrating construction methods, while almost all the attendees took turns doing the physical labor. (A few of us chose to observe only, leaving the heavy work to others.) Even with a large and willing team, five days was not enough to complete the process of carving the hull -- not least because we were all novices -- but Keerdo and Ruukel had anticipated this by arranging to have other boats present in various stages of completion. On one of those boats, we learned how to lay out and install the frames, which are fastened into the hull on the lashed-lug principle. To observe and participate in the critical process of expanding the hull, we made use of two other boats that had been under construction by other builders, and which had been submerged in the Pärnu River to soak for several days prior to the workshop. Carving was complete on these boats, but they had yet to be expanded.

Heating the hull along one side only.

Flexible alder rods are used to expand the hull, while brackets at the ends keep their shape and protect them from splitting. 

This, to me, was the most interesting procedure. The hull was placed on the ground and a fire was built alongside its entire length on one side only. As the heat softened the wet wood, sections of "green" black alder branches were inserted into the hull, which was carefully monitored for its developing shape. Brackets were placed over the gunwales at both ends to retain their shape as carved and protect them from splitting. A small amount of water was kept inside the hull and frequently brushed up the sides to keep them moist.

When one side was deemed sufficiently expanded, the hull was rotated 180° so that the other side faced the fire. This approach allows the alder rods to be installed and adjusted from the opposite side while keeping the side being expanded exposed to the fire and moist. According to Keerdo, this method is not traditional but, like several other procedures used during the workshop, was one of his own developments.

Participants had opportunities to paddle haabjas on the Pärnu River beside the building site.

The week featured more than just boatbuilding. We all had opportunities to paddle haabjas of various sizes and designs -- some of which were quite stable, others less so. Some lunches of traditional Estonian country food were served on site, picnic-style and for others we ate as a group at a nearby pub. We hiked a nature trail through the bog in Soomaa National Park, and some of us took a dip in a bog pool, the water of which is unusually fresh and pure due to the acidic peat of the bog. The final day included saunas -- a popular tradition in Estonia.

Three evenings were taken up with presentations in a comfortable meeting room at the Tori village hall, right across the road from the building site. Ruukel and Keerdo handled the first night's affairs, providing valuable input on haabjas traditions and the process in which we were engaged. On the second night, Béat Arnold gave a presentation on commercial logboat building in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), where he had recently completed fieldwork. On night three, I described the logboat use and construction methods of the Indigenous Warrau people of Guyana.

The diversity of the workshop's facilitators and participants was among the event's most engaging and valuable qualities. Participants from Estonia, Finland, Germany, Denmark, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and Alaska (I'm probably missing a couple) brought experience from museum science, heritage protection, traditional carpentry, boat building, archaeology, ethnography, education, tourism, and other fields. Everyone offered worthwhile input and observations on topics ranging from the construction process to its cultural context to the educational and heritage values of the event.

This short video provides a good feel for the experience and people at the workshop.

For information about future workshops and other nature experiences in the Soomaa National Park, contact Aivar Ruukel through his website, Soomaa.com. Tell him Bob sent you!

Expanding a Logboat While the Tree is Still Growing

 An intriguing experiment is under way to investigate how Russians in the 19th century (and probably earlier) took steps to expand logboats while the tree was still growing. The project involves Jaan Keerdo, who wrote a Masters thesis on Estonian logboat building, Aivar Kriiska, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Tartu (Estonia), Irina Khrustaleva, a Research Fellow in Archaeology at Tartu, and Aivar Ruukel, a nature guide (https://soomaa.com/), logboat expert, and PhD student at Estonian University of Life Sciences, who showed me the project recently in a state forest near Soomaa National Park in Estonia.

An osinovka, a Russian expanded-extended logboat. (Bogoslavsky.P.A 1859, plate 5) 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NWKIEjyq4PLduhANkFzK1JMVuGDDg_vy/view

In an article whose title translates as "On merchant shipbuilding in Russia, river and coastal" (1859), P.A. Bogoslavsky describes the construction of an expanded and extended logboat used for fishing by Pomor people around the Mezen River on the White Sea in Russia. The double-ended boat, called an osinovka, was up to about 5 meters long, 1 meter wide, and 1/2 meter in depth, and had capacity of 320 kg. The boat was propelled by two to four pairs of oars or a spritsail, and steering was done with an oar. An osinovka cost up to 10 rubles and gave 10-15 years of service. 

Built of aspen, construction of the osinovka began while the tree was still growing. Wooden wedges were driven into the trunk of the living tree and pounded a bit deeper every three days. When the opening became too large to be held open by wedges alone, braces were inserted into the split. After five years of "living expansion," the tree was felled, then additional hollowing was performed with axes or carefully tended fire. The carved trunk was filled with water and allowed to soak for a week, then it was emptied, and a low fire was built within the hollow. After the wood had softened from the combined effects of water and heat, the hull was expanded and braced with wooden stretchers.

Bogaslavsky's text says that "several" pine planks, 60-90cm wide and 2.5cm thick, were added as washstrakes, but his illustration shows only two planks, apparently much narrower than described. These were stitched to the logboat base and to up to four spruce frames which were fastened into the hull. The planks were laid flush and caulked with moss. The hull was tarred inside and out, and runners were added to the bottom.

There is no formal term in the boatbuilding lexicon for the expansion method Bogoslavky described, but Aivar Ruukel calls it wedge-cracking or live-tree expansion. Using Bogoslavsky's description as a starting point, Ruukel and his associates began their experiment in May, working with four large aspen trees all within a few dozen meters of each other. The experiment's objectives are to learn more about the technique, and to discover what (if any) benefits it confers to the boat or the boatbuilder. The team is in contact with Mikhail Stolyarov, a Russian boat builder who has firsthand memories of the wedge-cracking method from his childhood in the 1960s. (Stolyarov runs a private boat museum in Vologda Oblast, Russia. See https://bit.ly/belozersk.) 

Aivar Ruukel, on the ladder with a mallet, explaining the experiment.

When I visited the site in August, the cracks were already wide enough so that some of the first set of wedges were being driven flush with the outer surface of the tree, and in some places a second wedge was placed beside the first to continue the expansion. The splits were between 2 and 3 meters long, and a ladder was used to reach them and to drive the wedges with large mallets.

One of the four aspen trees with wedges inserted to open up the living trunk.

Many questions have already arisen. Will the cracks promote rot or disease in the trunk? How will live expansion affect the strength of the boat? Will it achieve a wider beam in the finished boat than is possible by conventional expansion methods? Will it reduce the amount of labor required for hollowing? How will this expand our knowledge of vernacular boatbuillding in Russia and elsewhere? We look forward to more questions, and hopefully answers, as the experiment continues.

Sources

Most information for this post was provided by Aivar Ruukel, including a translation of Bogaslavsky's article:

Богославский, П. А. О купеческом судостроении в России, речном и прибрежном / Павел Алексеевич Богославский. – Санкт-Петербург : [Изд. Морской Ученый Комитет], 1859. – 10, IV, 188 с..
Available in the original Russian at: https://webirbis.aonb.ru/irbisdoc/kr/2015/06kp083/68/  See pages 50-51.

Watercraft at Cambridge (UK) Anthropology Museum

Fans for watercraft ethnography would do well to visit Cambridge University's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Artefacts on display from many peoples reflect not only a variety of watercraft types and applications, but also a diversity of the ways in which watercraft are culturally significant to their users.

We'll start out with artefacts from the Canadian Artic before moving on to items from Oceania.

Kayak from Clyde Inlet, Baffin Island, Canada, collected in 1946.

Bow-end view of Baffin Island kayak.

Cockpit coaming and internal structure of Baffin Island kayak.

A section of skin pieced into the deck of the Baffin Island kayak. 

Kayak model and hunter from the Canadian Arctic, made from walrus ivory. The kayak is equipped with harpoons, spears and a sealskin float all fastened to the deck.

Walrus tusk collected in the Canadian Arctic in 1927, decorated with a scene of umiaks hunting whales, made for sale to Europeans.

Moving on to items from the Pacific world:

Dugout canoe collected in 1914 from the Utakwa River in West Papua (Irian Jaya) New Guinea.

Carved detail on New Guinea dugout canoe.

Beautifully carved canoe prow in the shape of a crocodile's head, collected in 1927 on the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Crocodiles are prominent not only in the river, but also in local myths and spiritual beliefs.

Decorated canoe paddles from the Sepik river.

Canoe "wave cutter" from Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. These decorative, symbolic devices are fitted to the bow of ocean-going canoes used in the kula ring of ritual trade between islands in New Guinea's Massim region. (See B. Malinowski's classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922.) Made in 2009.

Canoe carving in ebony and mother-of-pearl by Isaac Sulawai of Papua, New Guinea, made 2008-2009. According to the display card, the canoe's occupants are at sea but they are not paddling, leaving the canoe (and themselves) at risk of capsize -- a metaphor for PNG's lack of effective political leadership.

A late 19th or early 20th C "headhunting canoe" from New Georgia, Solomon Islands. The display card is ambiguous whether this is a reduced-size model or a full-size copy. In the latter case it would be a very small canoe, limited to a crew of perhaps two.

The prow of the Solomon Islands canoe, decorated with shells and mother-of-pearl.

Lashed-lug construction of the Solomon Islands canoe.

Toward the ends of the Solomon Islands canoe, the strakes are lashed directly to each other via the lugs that are left standing as the planks are carved.

Stern of the Solomon Islands canoe.

Bowls in the form of canoes, used to serve taro during feasts in the Solomon Islands, collected 1904. Carved dolphins and heads of frigate birds appear on both. Contrasting decoration of nautilus and conus shell. 

Detail of the "figureheads" on the lower of the two taro bowls from the Solomon Islands.

War canoe figurehead representing a crocodile, from the Kenyah people of Borneo, late 19th C. The eyes are Chinese porcelain teacups. The teeth are boars' tusks and sheet metal. 

Model of a Maori war canoe from New Zealand, 19th C. Real ones were up to 40m long -- too big to be collected by a museum -- so Maori craftsmen built models for ethnographers to collect.

Detail of gunwale carving on the Maori canoe model.

Bow carving on the Maori canoe model.

Figure at the base of the sternpost on the Maori canoe model.

Stern of the Maori canoe model.

Side-to-bottom stitching, carved thwart, and carved gunwale (amidships) on the Maori canoe model.

Maori Canoe bailer collected in Aotearoa, New Zealand, by Capt. Cook, 1768-1780. The eyes are of haliotis shell. A split has been repaired with flax thread.

Left: paddle from Solomon Islands, 1900, decorated both sides with a man in a canoe, frigate birds, and a man holding a pistol.
Middle: Maori paddle-club with shell inlay, New Zealand, collected by Capt. Cook.
Right: sternpost of a Maori war canoe (1905), similar to that on the model Maori canoe above. 

Wooden dish in the form of a double-hull canoe, used by a Fijian priest to hold scented oil.. From Rewa, Levu River, Fiji, collected ~1875.

Although the exhibits are somewhat old-fashioned in their presentation, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology appears to change most of them but rarely (if ever), it's enlightening nonetheless, and there are items here that are probably no longer in indigenous use. Museum entry is free.