Two Indigenous North American Boats in Maine Museums

A couple of trips to small museums in Maine yielded two nice boats: a bark canoe and a skin-of-frame kayak. It's almost like a snapshot from Adney and Chapelle's The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. 

The canoe, at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, is a fine reproduction. (We've written before about the Abbe Museum.) The kayak, at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, is an authentic artifact.

Birchbark canoe of the Penobscot style at the Abbe Museum, built by Steve Cayard and David Moses Bridges. It's 14 feet long, weighs 50 lb., and according to the exhibit card, it required 500 hours to build, plus 200 hours to gather materials. We've written previously about Steve Cayard's bark canoes, and not coincidentally, the canoe construction of his that we documented was assisted by David Moses Bridges. (Click any image to enlarge.)

The bark along the sides of the canoe is etched in traditional patterns. Bark is harvested in winter to obtain the brown color that can be scraped away to reveal the lighter color underneath. Seams between sections of bark are sewn with spruce root and sealed with pine resin.

Inner and outer gunwales are lashed together with split spruce roots and pegged. A gunwale cap is also pegged in place. The thwart is mortised into the inner gunwale (i.e., inwale) and lashed.  

The bow has an etched flap of bark held against the hull by the outer gunwale. It's known by the Passamaquoddy term for "diaper" and it is purely decorative.

At the Peary-MacMillan Museum: a kayak of Labrador Inuit design, built between 1860 and 1890.  

The very flat deck rises just a bit in front of the cockpit rim to make it easier to enter the kayak. Built to fit its paddler specifically, the kayak would still have been a tight fit. 

One can see the chine timber and one intermediate longitudinal member between it and the sheer timber (which is not visible). The kayak has minimal deck rigging. The paddle just above the kayak is extremely long, and the blades are especially narrow.

A model kayak just below the real one, built around 1914 by an Inuit for the MacMillan expedition's collection. 

The model has more elaborate deck rigging than the real kayak and a different shape cockpit rim. On the after deck is a harpoon line and drag. 

An Inuit child using an empty packing crate ("Spratt's dog biscuits") as a toy kayak, 1913.

Bark Canoe and Skin Kayak Items at L.C. Bates Museum

Although founded in the early 20th century, the L.C. Bates Museum, in Hinckley, Maine, is a throwback to an even earlier time, when many museums were more or less random collections of oddities. Here you will find biological specimens, works of art, and anthropological artifacts side by side, many of them labeled poorly or not at all and too many deteriorating from a lack of care due, apparently, to a paucity of funds.

Nevertheless, it's a fun place to browse on a short visit, it's cheap ($3 for adults), it's on the way to good canoeing and rafting in northern Maine, and it contains a couple exhibits of interest to us. One is about Native American (primarily Maine) birchbark technology; the other displays Greenland Inuit artifacts from the first decade of the 20th century.

This bark canoe model is over 3' long. It's decorated with hundreds of dyed porcupine quills, both ends of which are tucked into small holes pre-punched in the bark. Although the exhibit card says that it's "likely mid-west in origin," the ends are exaggerated representations of those on Canadian fur trade canoes. 

From the exhibit card: "This old, well-made model is an example of the thousands sold to Maine tourists in the late 19th and early 20th century (sic). This canoe shows how heated tree resin was used to seal and waterproof the birch bark joints. The word for canoe in all Abenaki languages in Aquiden."
Below the canoe model is a moose call, also made of birch bark.

An Abenaki canoe paddle, "of a size suited for teaching a young person the art of propelling a canoe."

A 19th century box with hinged covers, probably Penobscot, probably made for the tourist trade and intended for use as a picnic hamper. The crossed paddles and tepee designs -- of poorer quality than the box itself -- are incised in the bark in the same manner that canoes were decorated. 

Perspective view of the same box, with a round covered box, also of birch bark, behind.

The exhibit card identifies the miniature kayaks in this and the following photo as toys, made for indigenous children. This may be incorrect: except for the wooden one (above, right), they were probably made for the tourist trade and/or upon the request of researchers or collectors. The one above left is ivory, and the kayaker's hand is made to hold the harpoon that rests across the cockpit coaming.  

Two nicely authentic skin-on-frame kayak models.

The Greenland kayak was essentially a hunting tool, used primarily in the pursuit of seals and walruses. The main hunting weapon was a harpoon with a detachable head or foreshaft. The largest of these bone harpoon points and fragments are only about 4" long.