Book Review: The Politics of the Canoe, Bruce Erickson and Sarah Wylie Krotz (editors)

The Politics of the Canoe, edited by Bruce Erickson and Sarah Wylie Krotz, is a book of a different sort than that from which I normally obtain content for this blog or choose to review. A collection of essays, mostly academic in nature, it does not address the nuts and bolts of boat design, construction, or usage. As its title indicates, its central theme is the political implications of canoes. The book has no subtitle, but one would have been useful to clarify that its focus is upon the canoe in Canada, although a couple of the essays deal with some of the northern United States. The editors’ Preface describes it as “a multifaceted examination of a vessel that, while structurally simple, is remarkably complex in its meanings” (p.x).

Meanings, of course, are not inherent in objects, but instead are created, imposed by people, and any meanings that canoes have are therefore subjective. To the extent that “everything is political”, then canoes certainly have the potential to be viewed from a political point of view, just as a hammer can be “merely” a hammer, or it can symbolize the proletariat. Many of the essays’ authors read Colonialist meanings in the traditional Canadian discourse regarding canoes and argue for a new canoe discourse with First Nations at its center. Many of them are themselves First Nations people of Canada, and many are in academia, so the pro-indigenous, anti-colonial outlook that informs several of the essays is not unexpected. That said, the theme of “the political canoe” is addressed through varied, even eccentric, approaches, making for mostly diverse and engaging reading.

The book’s Introduction, written by its editors, uses the presentation of canoes in museums as a framework for addressing the politics inherent in the Canadian perception of canoes. Canoes in museum collections, they say, are problematic: “Given that canoes aren’t just cultural objects but are fundamental to many communities’ relations—as family members, as embodied heritage and sovereignty, as living parts of the land—the implications of placing them on display differ depending on the traditions from which the canoes came. In other words, context matters” (p.3).

Drawing on the work of other scholars, Erickson and Krotz outline the historic process by which the indigenous Canadian canoe was adopted by European settlers, notably by the voyageurs for the fur trade, after which it morphed into a recreational craft for a mainly middle class, white audience. As this transition occurred in a Canada increasingly settled and “civilized” by Europeans, the canoe’s indigenous origin was submerged by a mythology valorizing the voyageurs, who were depicted as having used the fur-trade canoe to bring order and civilization to a wild, unsettled land. Indigenous presence and history were erased from the narrative, and the indigenous invention and use of the canoe were part of the process. The greatest significance of the erasure of the indigenous canoe does not lie in the settlers’ tacit claim to the technology; more importantly, because the canoe was central to the cultures of many of Canada’s First Nations and formed both practical and cognitive bases of the people’s connection to the land which they inhabited, erasing the indigeneity of the canoe also erased culture and past occupation of the landscape – which, in turn, erased claims of land sovereignty.

This interpretation informs many of the essays, most of which address the position of the canoe at the intersection of indigenous and settler culture. But other factors are also at play, and other perspectives addressed. As the editors note, "Colonialism certainly looms large over the history of the canoe, but canoes are also intertwined in histories of masculinity, wilderness, consumption, and industrialization, among others” (p.6). And further, “the canoes in this book are agents not just of romantic affiliation with wilderness but of protest, power, governance, social and environmental knowledge, history, cultural resurgence, and sovereignty. Their politics range from collective actions to intensely personal, individual ones” (p.13).

The book is organized in three parts, and each of its ten chapters is preceded by a map which provides the geographic setting of its subject. Some of the essays are accompanied by photographs. The entire production is in black and white.

Each of the three essays/chapters in Part 1, which is titled “Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty”, concern different First Nations’ initiatives of cultural revitalization through canoe voyaging. Chapter 1, “Tribal Canoe Journeys and Indigenous Cultural Resurgence: A Story from the Heiltsuk Nation”, by Frank Brown, Hillary Beattie, Vina Brown, and Ian Mauro, begins with a brief history of the Heilstuk people (often called the Bella Bella) under colonialism. It then focuses on the history of the cultural gathering and voyaging program called Tribal Canoe Journeys (TCJ), which has been going on regularly since 1993. The authors emphasize the value of the program in reconnecting people of many of the Pacific Northwest’s First Nations, especially young people, to tribal traditions and ways of thought, and establishing solidarity between First Nations. They show how the voyaging itself, along with the shoreside activities associated with it, heal personal traumas, enhance participants’ self worth, and provide a venue for learning traditional language, song, dance, and history. Also strengthened during the meetings are intergenerational relationships; understanding and appreciation of the natural environment and resources; and strategies associated with environmental protection and land sovereignty.

Chapter 2, “This Is What Makes Us Strong: Canoe Revitalization, Reciprocal Heritage, and the Chinook Indian Nation”, by Rachel L. Cushman, Jon D. Daehnke, and Tony A. Johnson, covers much the same ground about Tribal Canoe Journeys and its predecessor, Paddle to Seattle, but focuses on the experience of the Chinook Nation. It uses lengthy first-person passages by co-author Cushman, who has participated in several of the voyages, to personalize the experience, and it makes the important point that “rather than being backward-looking and nostalgic, this form of reciprocal heritage is instead tribally relevant, based in current and ongoing relationships and responsibilities, and thus active, forward-looking, and resilient” (pp.51-52). Discussing “protocols” – traditional rules of behaviour that are taught at and which govern shoreside sessions on the voyages – the authors state, “…the performance of protocol is not just an aspect of culture, it is fundamentally an act of decolonization” (p.57). They make a distinction that I personally found enlightening and important:

“There can be a tendency to present these types of claims to heritage as something artificial, as invented political creations primarily constructed to convince others of the rightfulness of the claims. For the Chinook Indian Nation, however, the performance of protocols is not an act created or designed to convince others of the rightfulness of their heritage claims or their Indigeneity. Instead, it is simply behaviour done to ensure that the requirements of the reciprocal relationships between actors, both human and non-human, are fulfilled” (p.65).

They contrast this with voyageur re-enactments, which they describe as a display of nostalgia, a “yearning for the period of colonialism itself” (p.66).

“Whaèhdǫ ǫ̀ Etǫ K’e”, the title of Chapter 3, means “Trails of our Ancestors” and is the name of another voyaging-and-revitalization program, this one by the “Tłı̨chǫ Nation”. I find the use of such special typographic characters by authors John B. Zoe and Jessica Dunkin unhelpful, and partially blame the book’s editors for its presence. I had to refer to Wikipedia to learn that “Tłı̨chǫ” … people, sometimes spelled Tlicho and also known as the Dogrib, are a Dene First Nations people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group living in the Northwest Territories, Canada.” The purpose of Trails of our Ancestors is to reconnect Tlicho youth with the landscape around them, and to the stories, traditions and culture embedded within it. This, the authors explain, is “both a physical and symbolic act of resistance to colonial efforts to remove Tłı̨chǫ from the land” (p.85). I was struck by the statement that “Women and men worked together to build canoes” (p.77) in traditional Tlicho culture and wished for more detail, as direct female participation in boatbuilding is rare in traditional cultures.

Thus, the first three chapters all deal with different manifestations of the same phenomenon and, while each has a unique and valuable perspective, it is also somewhat repetitive. The reader will find greater variety of subject matter in the remaining parts of the book.

The theme of Part 2, Building Canoes, Knowledge, and Relationships, seems an amorphous one that doesn’t really provide a coherent theme for its three chapters – for which we might be thankful, given the excessive thematic consistency of Part 1. Chapter 4, “Model Canoes, Territorial Histories, and Linguistic Resurgence: Decolonizing the Tappan Adney Archives”, by Chris Ling Chapman, discusses the ethnographic work conducted in New Brunswick, Canada, by the author of the excellent and influential The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Adney, the authors explain, was conducting what is known as “salvage anthropology” – the desperate collection of data in the face of imminent cultural disappearance, as was widely believed (among settlers) at that time to apply to the First Nations of Canada. In addition to the renowned model canoes he built from first-hand observation of full-size canoes, it is Adney’s unpublished notebooks that represent what were considered to be “salvage archives”. As it turned out, most of Canada’s First Nations survived, and Adney’s archives, far from being a record of dead cultures, are now providing valuable resources for the revitalization of those cultures. Among the most important of their content is Adney’s recording of native languages, which is aiding current efforts to revive those languages after decades of white efforts to exterminate them along with other aspects of indigenous culture.

In spite of Chuck Commanda’s prodigious skill as a builder of bark canoes and his substantial contribution to the revival of the craft, Chapter 5, “Ginawaydaganuc: The Birchbark Canoe in Algonquin Community Resurgence and Reconciliation”, by Commanda, Larry McDermott, and Sarah Nelson, is the weakest essay in the collection. Unfortunately, the chapter reads like a manifesto, a lengthy series of didactic assertions of the power and importance of bark canoe building as a tool for revitalizing and preserving cultural heritage. Any of its numerous assertions might well be valid, but none of them are adequately supported by evidence or logical argument. One example taken truly at random will illustrate this: “Teaching a young Indigenous person how to become a canoe builder can give them a path in life and a reason to have both hope for the future and pride in their people” (p.113). As a goal, this is admirable, but there is no indication here that it is true: the authors provide no data, examples, or even anecdotes, to support it, and this is the case with dozens of similar assertions throughout the chapter. Two lengthy appendices, consisting of the texts of two sections of the 2010 UN Convention on Biological Diversity, are peripheral to the chapter’s main argument and could have been satisfactorily replaced with URLs for online locations of the texts.

Chapter 6, “Pathways to the Forest: Meditations on the Colonial Landscape”, by Jonathan Goldner, is a first-person account of learning how and where to harvest birchbark for canoe construction. Goldner uses his description of that education, and of the harvesting process itself, to evocatively discuss the history and impact of colonialism on the Algonquin landscape of Quebec and Ontario. Harvesting bark serves as a microcosm for that impact and a metaphor of native rights to the land. It’s a thoughtful, personal, almost poetic piece by “a relative newcomer, a settler, a non-Indigenous, academically inclined male urbanite” (p.136) attempting to understand the indigenous point of view.

Part 3, “Telling Histories”, begins with Chapter 7, “Beyond Birchbark: How Lahontan’s images of Unfamiliar Canoes Confirm His Remarkable Western Expedition of 1688”, by Peter H. Wood. Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de Lahontan, Baron de Lahontan, explored areas west and south of the Great Lakes in 1688-89. His book about his travels, which includes descriptions of the geography and the indigenous people he encountered, was published in 1703 and went into several translations and editions but, because of his anti-Jesuit opinions, Pope Clement XI banned it. Between that official censure and some inaccuracies in his geography that became clear after later explorations, his account has been largely discounted as fiction, and aspersions cast upon the trustworthiness of both the man and his travel account. Author Wood believes the book is a largely accurate description of the Midwest’s geography as Lahontan saw it, with a few errors such as are likely to appear in any such work of this time and era. He identifies the river Lahontan travelled along and called the River Longue as the middle and upper Missouri River. He bases this conclusion mainly on two canoe illustrations on a map in the book, the accuracy of which, he argues, must have been due to Lahontan’s actual travel through the region. This argument is weak. The illustrations are rough and schematic, and Woods’ identification of them with specific indigenous boat designs questionable. The one identified as a dugout canoe of the continent’s interior could just as well depict a bark canoe, for all its lack of detail. Regarding the other, Lahontan explained that it represents a canoe from the Pacific Northwest, which he never claimed to have come even close to, and the information for it was obtained from an indigenous slave from that region whom he spoke with while in the Dakotas. In fact, the illustration is not nearly so convincing a depiction of a Kwakiutl logboat as Wood claims it is, and Lahontan’s stated source provides no assurance whatsoever that he travelled the Missouri or visited the Dakotas. I have not read Lahontan’s book and I have no opinion on its veracity, but Wood’s evidence for its truthfulness is weak.

Another weakness concerning the essay is its “political” aspect. The pope’s banning of Lahontan’s book was a political act which influenced popular perception of its accuracy, but that has nothing to do with canoes. Wood employs iconographic evidence of canoes in order to establish Lahontan’s credibility and overcome the ramifications of that political act of censorship, but that seems a tenuous connection to the book’s theme.

Chapter 8, “Monumental Trip: Don Starkell’s Canoe Voyage from Winnipeg to the Mouth of the Amazon”, by Albert Braz, is perhaps the most accessible and engaging of the essays, mainly because it recounts (in condensed form) the narrative of Starkell’s 1987 book, Paddle to the Amazon. Braz feels that the book, its author, and his achievement (paddling a canoe 12,000 miles from Winnipeg to Belem, Brazil) have not attained the recognition and respect in Canada that are their due. This, he argues, is due to Starkell's lower-class (white, Canadian) origin, pugnacious attitude, and straightforward prose, which do not mesh well with the largely middle-class identification of modern Canadian recreational canoeing, nor with the more literary style of most popular expedition narratives. Starkell obtained scant attention, much less support, from the Canadian government while traveling through Latin America, and a secondary political aspect of the essay treats with Canada's negligible visibility and influence in Latin America.

In Chapter 9, “The Dam That Wasn’t: How the Canoe Became Political on the Petawawa River”, Cameron Baldassarra describes how multiple constituencies, including recreational canoeists, kayakers, and rafters, environmentalists, historical preservationists, hunters and fishers, a town, and First Nations people, formed an alliance to oppose a planned hydropower dam near Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. The canoe became a central symbol and rallying point for that opposition due to its multiple meanings and uses: as a symbol of wilderness; as a vehicle to enter and utilize the landscape and its resources in a sustainable manner; as recreation; as a sustainable economic activity; as indigenous heritage. It is ironic that what stopped the dam was not grassroots politics, but the Canadian military, whose nearby base would have been partially flooded by the dam. But this, the author asserts, does not negate the wide appeal, symbolic power, and organizing potential of the canoe.

In the final essay, “Unpacking and Repacking the Canoe: Canoe as Research Vessel” (Chapter 10), anthropologist Danielle Gendron uses a canoe trip along the 386-km length of the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW), a partly-artificial inland route between Lakes Huron and Ontario, as a personal approach to explore "my engagement with and study of Indigenous landscapes" (p.215). The author colorfully details a bit of the lives of her Metis (mixed European and First Nations) fourth-level great-grandfather, who worked for the Hudson Bay Company, and his Metis wife, and says they surely would have travelled through this landscape prior to creation of the TSW.

Gendron describes how European settlers altered this former Anishinaabe landscape, first for agriculture, then for commercial shipping, and finally for recreation, and in the process erased indigenous people from the landscape. As a nationally designated historical location, the TSW ignores the indigenous past and creates a “colonialscape”, a term Gendron borrows from Kwakwaka’wakw scholar Sarah Hunt. This returns to the theme addressed by others in the book, of how the canoe, the landscape, and the past have all been appropriated in a manner that positions whiteness as the official Canadian identity. “How can we disrupt these colonialscapes that are perpetuated through the practice of canoeing?” Gendron asks. “How can we understand canoe trips as negotiating colonized Indigenous territories rather than a natural wonderland?”

As partial answers, she recommends sources from which readers can learn about native occupation, embeddedness, and history in the landscape, and urges the importance of learning the native names for places one travels through. She does not make the unrealistic recommendation that everyone become an expert in native history, but instead suggests that the canoe can be used as a vehicle to “engage in understanding colonial processes and the colonialscape of Canada” (p.227) – a suggestion that aptly summarizes the central theme of this worthwhile and thought-provoking collection of essays.

The Politics of the Canoe
Bruce Erickson and Sarah Wylie Krotz, editors
2021
University of Manitoba Press
ISBN 978-0-88735-909-9 (paperbound: also in e-book, hardcover)

Book Review: The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia, by Harri Luukkanen and William W. Fitzhugh

There are strong but superficial similarities between The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia, a new book by Harri Luukkanen and William W. Fitzhugh, and the 1964 classic The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle. Obviously, there is the title, clearly meant as a respectful acknowledgement of the older work. The two books have the same publisher (Smithsonian), and the same format, both being oversize, printed in black and white, with the text laid out in two columns per page. Luukkanen and Fitzhugh even call their work a “sequel” to Adney & Chapelle. In spite of all this, Northern Eurasia really is a different sort of book from North America. This makes it no less excellent than the older work that it honors, but to appreciate this, the reader must overcome any preconceptions that the similarities might instill. Taken on its own terms, is excellent scholarship and a valuable contribution to the field of small craft studies.

The book’s Introduction contains an explicit homage to “Adney & Chapelle” and a description of that book’s origins. It then goes on to describe the rationale for the present study, which basically boils down to two facts: in spite of the vast region’s long and pervasive use of these types of watercraft, the subject has never been systematically studied; and most studies of particular boats or types in the region are not available in English – or, indeed, in any Western European language. The Introduction then defines the geographic area of the study and the types of boats under consideration.

Chapter 1 describes the geography of northern Eurasia, including overviews of its climate zones, and river systems, cultures and their histories, and a brief contextualization of the region’s archaeology and the relationship between boat studies in northern Eurasia and North America.

Chapter 2, titled “Boat Classification, Construction, and Regional Distribution”, is essentially a summary and synthesis of Chapters 3-9, each of which focuses on a different geographic sub-region of northern Eurasia. The authors present a typology of the region’s various bark canoes and skin boats, based on major construction methods and morphology, and divided along lines of geography and culture groups. The authors conclude that bark canoe types tend to be fairly consistent within major river basins, even if more than one culture is resident, and that this intra-basin consistency is greater than that found among single cultures whose territories run across two or more river basins. The authors also draw attention to the large varieties of open and decked skin boats, both of which were found to be widely distributed across the region among a great many of its cultures.

One might question the placement of this chapter before, rather than after, the presentation of data in chapters 3-9. For scholars who are knowledgable about Eurasian cultures, this will make good sense, as a summary and synthesis may be primarily what is needed, and the reader can use it as a guide to targeted reading of the following chapters. For many readers, though, it may prove confusing or frustrating, as much of the geography and many of the cultures discussed will be unfamiliar to most Westerners. For readers (myself included) who don’t know the Vepsians, the Evenks, the Yugra, the Kereks, and many other cultures mentioned, the chapter is somewhat bewildering, in spite of brief overviews in the Introduction. Such readers might be advised to read this chapter later.

The real meat of the book appears in chapters 3-9, concerning Northern Europe (Ch. 3; Germany, southern Baltics, Fennoscandia); Northeastern Europe (Ch. 4; eastern Baltics, western Urals); Western Siberia (Ch. 5); Central Siberia (Ch. 6); Eastern Siberia (Ch. 7); Pacific Siberia (Ch. 8; Chukotka, Kamchatka, and the Kuril Islands); and the Far East (Ch. 9; Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, China, and northern Japan).

As the authors note, it is ironic that northern Europe – the area probably most familiar to most readers, and the one for which there is the best historic literature – has the poorest archaeological record for bark canoes and skin boats. The reader is introduced to the authors’ method, in which data are presented in detail and analyzed at length. There are lengthy descriptions of the ethnohistorical data and the archaeological evidence. For example, prehistoric Scandinavian rock art depictions of boats have been addressed by several authors, and no agreement has yet been reached within the archaeology community as to whether these petroglyphs represent logboats, skin boats, bark canoes, or even watercraft at all. Luukkanen and Fitzhugh review the arguments in detail and at length and bring new data and interpretations to the debate, but are cautious of reaching firm conclusions. This may be disappointing for those looking for straightforward answers, but it is intellectually honest to an extent not always seen in maritime archaeology – much less in books written for non-specialist, “enthusiast” audiences.

Most chapters follow a regular organization: the geographic sub-region is introduced and the deep history of its cultures described. This is highly useful to those readers who are unfamiliar with the numerous cultures. The general archaeology for the region’s cultural history is presented, followed by separate sections on each of individual cultures to be discussed. Within each section, the archaeological evidence for boat usage – much of which is often indirect – is presented first, followed by historical and ethnohistorical data. As archaeological evidence is generally scanty, it is not until the latter stages that we typically get images of boats, details of construction, and descriptions of usage. The ethnohistorical data varies a great deal in quality, from mere mentions by early explorers or merchants of the existence of certain boat types among the various nations, to the careful (but unfortunately rare) descriptions of boat structure and construction by trained observers. Likewise, the accompanying figures vary from the highly romanticized and technically inaccurate renderings one sees in travelogues and maps from the 16^th and 17^th centures, to careful, precise boat surveys that show the boats’ lines and construction details, and photographs of full-size boats in use in the early 20^th century and models in museum collections.

The final chapter, called an Epilogue, by Arctic boat scholar Evguenia (Jenya) Anichtchenko, addresses the relationship between the Eurasian and North American boat traditions. This presents the data and theories for diffusion between the two regions, and notes the surprisingly thin evidence for much direct influence across the narrow Bering Strait.

Overall, The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia provides a comprehensive, fine-grained look at its subject as ethnology, concentrating on the evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory. Those expecting a Eurasian equivalent to The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America may be disappointed. The older book’s strengths are in its descriptions of construction methods and structural details, and especially, in the quality of the boat plans. These were possible because Adney and Chapelle were writing about boat traditions which, although on their last legs, were still extant. Construction by individuals brought up in the indigenous traditions could still be observed and documented, and the boats themselves could still be surveyed in detail. The result was a book that has often served as a construction manual – complete with designs – for countless individuals to build their own replicas.

This was not possible for the boats of Eurasia. Most of the boats discussed disappeared generations or centuries ago – before there was a chance for much ethnographic recording. This means that construction methods are generally described in far less detail – if at all – and boat plans are few. Unfortunately for the enthusiast, those that are present are generally reproduced too small to be of practical use, and this criticism can be applied to the art program of the book in general. With few exceptions, figures are reproduced to the width of one column on the two-column pages, making legibility poor for drawings and photographs alike. Drawings produced especially for the book, mostly for the purpose of typological description or clarification, are sketchy and not of professional quality, making it difficult to understand differences in boat types. Maps, on the other hand, are excellent and are reproduced at full page width, for good legibility. All illustrations are in black and white only, which is not a liablity, since only a very few recent photos of boat models in museum collections would have been created in color.

The amount of detail and the length of some discussions can be heavy going, but they provide excellent perspectives on what is known, what can be surmised, and what is debatable. By highlighting open questions, the authors have set out challenges, or even roadmaps, to other researchers who, I expect, will respond with future research papers and possibly some PhD theses.

The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia is a major contribution to ethnological boat studies. Particularly for those familiar mainly with the boats of North America and western Europe, it is a broad and comprehensive introduction to the archaeology and history of small craft of a region rarely discussed in the English-language literature. It will take its place as an essential reference, next to The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, not as a sequel, but in its own right.

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The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia
by Harri Luukkanen and William W. Fitzhugh
Smithsonian Books, Washington DC
$64.00; 276 pages
ISBN 978-1-58834-475-5

Harvey Golden's Magnificent Kayak Surveys

 

My usual approach to using reading material for this blog is to take some interesting (to me) facts that I read concerning some kind of boat, or some culture's use of boats, and condense, paraphrase, or synthesize the source into an article, hopefully for the benefit or entertainment of my readers. Sometimes I rely entirely on a single source; at others, I'll do a little more digging into the subject and put together what amounts to an essay on the subject.

This time, the books themselves are the subject, because Harvey Golden's Kayaks of Alaska (2015) and Kayaks of Greenland: The History and Development of the Greenlandic Hunting Kayak, 1600-2000 (2006) are huge, valuable, awesomely impressive, and worthy of an article about themselves. When I opened the mailing package that contained them, I was, without exaggeration, awestruck by the enormous quantity of sheer fact they contain and the clarity of its presentation. Having lived with them for a few months now, my opinion has not diminished a bit.

Golden is an independent researcher in the field of museum studies. He has examined and surveyed almost every historically significant kayak held in museum collections and many private collections in Europe and North America, taking off lines, photographing and sketching the most minute and intricate details, and delving into the collections' documentation and the historical, popular, and academic writings of others. When personally surveying an artifact, no detail seems to escape his notice. If a deck line had once been present on a kayak but was later removed, perhaps 200 years ago, Golden is certain to have detected it by the presence of a tiny nub of a thong cut off close to the deck. 

Kayaks of Alaska and Kayaks of Greenland divide the boats surveyed by geographic and cultural ranges, each associated with different boat types. In the Greenland book, Golden creates a typology of eight types, although the distinctions between the types are sometimes difficult to see. Certainly, the kayaks of Greenland are more similar to one another than the kayaks of Alaska, where the differences between nine regional types Golden describes are in some cases really dramatic. Hereafter, we'll focus on the more recent Kayaks of Alaska. Kayaks of Greenland is similar in most respects.

A kayak from Point Barrow, from Kayaks of Alaska (Click any image to enlarge.)

Kayaks of Alaska begins with a short chapter of history. This is followed by nine chapters on the kayaks of different regions -- said regions defined by cultural borders and the distinct types of kayaks used within them (e.g., Unangan, Central Yup'ik, Southern Inupiaq, etc.). These nine sections, therefore, constitute a typology of Alaskan kayaks, one which Golden has developed as an expansion on the thinking of kayak scholars before him.

Lines of a North Alaska kayak in the Burke Museum, Seattle, from Kayaks of Alaska

Each chapter on a kayak type begins with a more detailed history of the kayaks themselves and of the history and scholarship concerning those kayaks, illustrated with drawings and photographs from historical and academic sources as well as Golden's own illustrations. The type is clearly and exhaustively defined and variations are discussed. This is followed by a series of plates of lines and construction drawings of several artefactual kayaks of the type, the plates being followed by a section containing detailed descriptions of each one. These descriptions discuss the artifact's provenance, its condition, and construction and decorative details; compare and contrast it to others of the same type; and in some cases discuss the construction of recent replicas and their performance. (Golden has built several, which he maintains in his own museum, the Lincoln Street Kayak & Canoe Museum in Portland, OR.)

Construction plan of a North Alaska Kayak at the Center for Wooden Boats, Seattle, from Kayaks of Alaska

Golden produces his lines drawings by hand, and they are admirably clean and detailed. In several instances where the kayak has been damaged by accident or deformed by inadequate support over the years, he reproduces the lines "as surveyed," and beside them shows lines for a likely "as-built" reconstruction based on the scantlings of the boat and on the form of other kayaks of the same type. In cases where good lines drawings were already made by others, he reproduces these instead. 

Interior construction details of an Alaskan kayak, from Kayaks of Alaska

In addition to standard waterline, sheer plan, and section lines, several of the kayaks are presented in a three-quarters view that gives one an excellent feel for the shape that standard views sometimes fail to impart. He also includes sketches of numerous construction and decorative details, deck fittings, and deck equipment associated with the boat in question.

Kayak builders, from Kayaks of Alaska

Chapters on kayak construction, equipment, and paddles follow the chapters on kayak types. The chapter on construction is not a "how-to," however: it will tell you little or nothing about how to select lumber, cut a mortise, or steam-bend a rib. Rather, it addresses the construction details that are common to many or all of the boats, right down to details such as knots and lashing patterns for the joints between longitudinal and transverse structural members. (Deviations from common construction methods are covered in minute detail in the descriptions of the individual artifacts that follow the plates in each "type" chapter.) If you want to build one of the boats in this book and lack knowledge of skin-on-frame construction methods, I recommend The Aleutian Kayak by Wolfgang Brinck and Building the Greenland Kayak by Christopher Cunningham (neither of which, I believe, are in print). For would-be builders who do possess building skills, Kayaks of Alaska and Kayaks of Greenland contain the necessary lines and construction details, but not tables of offsets, from which accurate reproductions can be built. (Golden provides instructions for lifting offsets from the plans on his website.)

A charming bonus in Kayaks of Alaska is a section of color plates containing reproductions of Golden's hand-drawn depictions of colored decorative details on many of the kayaks and paddles. Aside from this, all illustrations in both books are in black and white.

These are big, heavy books, each 8.5" x 11" and over 500 pages. As self-published projects, they are extraordinary for the quality of their production, but this is almost trivial compared to the quality and value of their contents. They are not books that many will sit down and read cover-to-cover, for the descriptions of thousands of details on dozens of kayaks do not make for an engaging narrative. But one can dip into them at any point and learn something about kayak history or about a particular design, and as reference sources, they are incomparable in their clear and comprehensive coverage of their subjects.

In the immense contribution they make to the study of indigenous watercraft, Golden's books stand as equals to Adney and Chapelle's The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America and Haddon and Hornell's Canoes of Oceania. Kayaks of Alaska and Kayaks of Greenland are magnificent achievements. 

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Visit Harvey Golden's website to purchase Kayaks of Alaska and Kayaks of Greenland. IndigenousBoats.com has no business affiliation with Harvey Golden, and we make no commissions on sales of his books. 

"The Boyne Currach" -- A Review

The Boyne Currach: From beneath the shadows of Newgrange, by Claidhgh (I understand it's pronounced "Clive") O' Gibne has received quite positive reviews. (Here's one, by Wade Tarzia.) I'm disappointed that I can't add to them. I find the book gravely flawed and seriously wanting.

The Boyne is a river in County Meath, Ireland, running generally toward the east and entering the Irish Sea north of Dublin. The river's common fishing boat was the currach, a small, nearly round leather-on-frame craft that in most of the British Isles is known as a coracle. (O' Gibne addresses the naming controversy.) The large landowners along the Boyne used to jealously guard their exclusive rights to fish the river, maintaining their own small fleets of currachs and hiring men to fish for salmon with seine nets. As O' Gibne tells it, in spite of privately-employed wardens and monitoring by the local police, poaching by private currach owners was widespread (but we'll make no puns -- none! -- about poached fish).

The Boyne Currach describes this local history. It also delves into the history and mythology of skin-on-frame craft in general; the history and folkways of the Boyne Valley; the ancient history of the Celts and Ireland; and the history of modern currach preservation efforts. There's a chapter (just one) on how to build a Boyne currach; another about the Boyne Currach Centre, which O' Gibne founded and maintains to perpetuate the craft of the craft; and a section about the Newgrange Currach Project, referring to an entirely different form of currach (the more familiar boat-shaped type, somewhat similar to Tim Severin's Brendan) which O' Gibne had under construction at the time of the book's publication.

Boyne currachs, 1848
(All images from The Boyne Currach. Click any image to enlarge)

This great variety of material is, in my opinion, one of the flaws of The Boyne Currach: it attempts too much in its 164 pages and loses coherence along the way. I would have liked more detail on the boatbuilding methods for both the types discussed. O' Gibne's description of the building process for the coracle-style currach is confusing and perfunctory (especially concerning leather tanning), and he merely glosses the construction of the larger boat-shaped vessel. There are, however, enough excellent photographs and (perhaps) enough usable illustrations so that one could build a coracle-style currach by referring to them and perhaps gleaning sufficient tidbits from the text to supplement them.

In this 1910 photo of a Boyne currach, the gentleman in the bowler hat is J.P. Holland, inventor of the first practical submarine. 

In addition to its historical photos and illustrations, The Boyne Currach contains sketches by O' Gibne. These, though, are often mere decorations, and even among those that attempt to be informative, many are full of distracting, nouveau-Celtic imagery and other New-Agey psychedelia and therefore lacking in clarity.

Purportedly showing to how twist willow rods to make the rope that supports the seat in a currach.

When it comes to the history of currach folk on the Boyne, O' Gibne is indiscriminate, mixing history and anecdotes about fishing and poaching with irrelevancies about milking cows and riding bicycles. These decades-old bits of gossip may be of interest to local residents who recognize their neighbors' great-grandparents in them, but they're of little value to readers whose primary interest is the boats themselves.

Most significantly, The Boyne Currach needed an editor. The language is often idiomatic or just plain unclear, the organization disjointed, too many of the how-to explanations are sketchy, and the content frequently drifts off-topic. I find this inexcusable in a book that was peer-reviewed, as its publisher, Four Courts Press, claims all its books are.

I understand that this is harsh, and I take no pleasure in slamming what was a sincere and worthy effort. O' Gibne's research concerning the historical use of the Boyne currach is worthwhile to historians and students of folkways. His dedication to learning traditional currach-building skills and perfecting his own is commendable, and the boats he builds are lovely in the way that simple tools and antique technologies can be. That he has taken his love for the currach and turned it into a vibrant cultural-and-boating organization (The Boyne Currach Centre) is admirable. Thanks to O' Gibne, there are now many boaters campaigning their home-built currachs on the Boyne and elsewhere, and that's just flat-out wonderful.

The Boyne Currach is not entirely lacking in value. As noted, it contains much that will be of use to historians, and its historical photos and illustrations are quite revealing of the currach's construction and use. It is, however, difficult to read and lacking in the clarity and detail that could have made it much more useful to boatbuilders and boat history enthusiasts.

NOTE: I know The Boyne Currach is well-liked by some of my readers. I welcome opposing viewpoints in the Comments.

Raft Wackos

Everyone's heard of Kon Tiki, the balsa raft and the eponymous book by raftconteur Thor Heyerdahl. And a few of us are aware of some of Heyerdahl's other rafting adventures, especially on the reed boats Ra and Tigris. But who knew that Heyerdahl had inspired literally dozens of other raft trips by other quasi-scientists, dreamers, solitaries and assorted wackos?

In Sea Drift, author P.J. Capelotti recounts more than 40 rafting expeditions since 1947, when Heyerdahl sailed and drifted in Kon Tiki across a good chunk of the Pacific Ocean. He does this briefly in most cases, since there's only so much detail you can fit into an under-300 page book that attempts to cover so many different stories. But what comes out is the notion that transoceanic rafting has a strange allure to certain strange individuals, and that there are a surprising number of them who have, or can scare up, the resources to act on it. I almost said "to turn their dreams into reality," but stopped myself, because that would be highly inaccurate, since a large majority of the rafting expeditions were miserable failures by almost any yardstick. Certainly, few of them succeeded in achieving their geographic targets, whether those targets were highly specific islands, or more generalized goals like "across the whole damn ocean" (or, in one case, a world circumnavigation! Don't make me laugh.). In fact, a good number of these would-be ocean crossers never got more than a few miles off their coast of departure. Some were simply unable to cross contrary currents or work against contrary winds. Others were poorly built from the get-go and began to fall apart almost immediately.

That's not to say that there weren't some fairly impressive adventures -- but still, they never really proved anything. Most of them sought to demonstrate that some People could have settled some land by means of rafts. But that's a big so what? I could have written The DaVinci Code. It gets one not a bit further in discovering whether they actually did, or how.

Capelotti has a certain amount of sympathy for many of his subjects, and a great deal of (probably undeserved) respect for Heyerdahl, who has been credibly accused to making up huge chunks of the so-called science upon which he based his transoceanic settlement theories. (I recall reading an article titled "Con Tiki.") And it is interesting, from sociological and nautical points of view, to read these brief descriptions of these oddball adventures.


The book includes fairly crude sketches of many of the rafts, and just a single photo (of Heyerdahl, naturally). Of greater use are a couple of tables in appendices that list every post-WWII oceanic raft trip, their leaders, dates, basic construction materials (e.g., balsa, reed, plywood), geographic goals, results, and present disposition of the raft The book appears to be out of print (I found it deeply discounted in a local bookstore), but it's fairly recent (2001, Rutgers University Press), and I suspect it could be had if one looked hard enough.

Great Heart -- Great Book

Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure is one of the best Canadian canoeing adventures I've read. Also one of the most unusual. Written by James West Davidson and John Rugge (coauthors of the justly well-known Complete Wilderness Paddler), Great Heart tells the stories of three related expeditions and, especially, the principals involved. The expeditions -- the first, disastrous one organized by Leonidas Hubbard Jr., and the second and third organized, respectively, by Hubbard's widow and by a survivor of the first -- are not unknown to students of canoeing history, having been covered in various books by the principals and by other later historians. What makes the book unique is the authors' approach to their subjects, and their sensitive depiction of the principals' personalities, based on good documentary research leavened with persuasive but frankly speculative extrapolation. 

Hubbard was a writer for Outing, one of the most popular outdoors magazines in the early 20th century (and having nothing to do with the exposure of homosexuality). Having only a moderate level of experience in the outdoors and feeling the need to prove himself to his demanding and more experienced editor through the completion of an impressive expedition, Hubbard organized an expedition in northern Labrador -- "one of the last blank spaces on the map" -- that proved too ambitious and not sufficiently carefully planned or outfitted. Launching from the Northwest River Post on Groswater Bay off the North Atlantic, the trip would would visit the seldom-seen Naskapi Indians in the interior of Labrador on its way to George River Post on Ungava Bay, a distance of about 550 miles. The first half of the trip was upstream all the way on rivers that were only slightly known by a small number of local trappers. Hubbard chose as his companions his friend Dillon Wallace and a "halfbreed" Cree guide, George Elson, who was not familiar with the area, but who had substantial wilderness experience. 

The expedition was beset by bad planning, poor provisioning, and bad luck from the very start. The wood/canvas canoe was too small to carry sufficient provisions, and Hubbard decided against carrying shotguns, which might have helped in supplementing their food stocks later. The expedition got too late a start, and was overtaken by snow, then blizzard. Food ran out. Most gravely, it took off up the wrong river and never discovered the fact until the very end of its retreat. 

Working from diaries, previous publications by the survivors, and news reports, the authors describe a truly harrowing ordeal from which Hubbard did not return. His coexpeditioners did, but just barely. After his return to New York, Wallace, with great reluctance but at the widow Mina Hubbard's request, wrote a book-length account of the expedition, published as The Lure of the Labrador Wild. In it, he portrayed Leonidas Hubbard in nearly heroic terms while still acknowledging his faults by way of explaining the expedition's failure. 

Mina was incensed, however, at any implication that her husband was in any way to blame for that failure or for his own death. She decided to launch her own expedition to prove that his plan was a good one, and that it was only his companions -- specifically, Wilson -- who had failed him and the expedition. At the same time, Wallace mounted his own expedition, essentially to prove the opposite proposition -- that a properly-mounted expedition would have succeeded. Mina enlisted George Elson, and the two expeditions set out at the same time in 1905, manifestly racing one another while refusing to acknowledge the others' existence. 

The authors, writing in a highly novelized style, tell the somewhat speculative but highly touching tale of how Mina romantically manipulated George as part of her plan for the expedition's success. George, terrified of even the slightest implication that he, as a half-breed, would dare to look at a refined white woman, was vulnerable to the sophisticated Mina and, ultimately, heartbroken. Both expeditions succeeded in reaching the George River Post -- Mina's much sooner and more comfortably; Wilson's only after much travail. But Mina's expedition had not, in fact, replicated her husband's plan -- hers was better provisioned, better manned, and understood the wrong turn that Mr. Hubbard's trial had taken at the start. So while she won the race, she failed to prove her point. Wilson came closer to proving his point of view, but just barely -- his expedition nearly failed for some of the same reasons that Leonidis Hubbard's did. 

What sets the book apart is its novelistic treatment of fact, and the storytellers' willingness to extrapolate from sometimes ambiguous journal entries in the interests of telling a tale full of adventure, hardship, intrigue, romance and, of course, canoeing. The 1988 Viking edition that I read included fine historic photos of all three expeditions, plus maps that are important to understanding the race -- marred, unfortunately, by having Mina's and Wilson's separate courses mislabeled, which caused some confusion until I realized the simple nature of the problem. I would hope that the 1996 Kodansha Globe edition, the link to which I've included below, has retained the photos and fixed the map problem. Davidson's and Rugge's earlier, excellent (but now somewhat dated) canoeing technique book was so excellent that it shouldn't be entirely surprising that they might succeed as coauthors to a second book, but this one is so entirely different from the first that it surprises nonetheless. They succeed not only as historians, but more, as storytellers. The events themselves are probably of no real historic significance -- one man died out of three expeditions that didn't really prove anything or reveal any new geographic knowledge to the world -- but the the personalities and the motivations of the principal actors make it a valuable story in purely human terms.

Book Review: Water and Sky

Water and Sky: Reflections of a Northern Year
(review by Bob Holtzman)

Why review a book nearly 20 years old? Aside from the obvious answer (that I just read it), because it's a fine one that, if not quite invisible, has certainly been overlooked or forgotten by those who care about canoe literature.

Kesselheim is a fairly well-known canoeing author (various magazines, The Wilderness Paddler's Handbook, Camp Cook's Companion, etc.). At the time of the adventure he writes about in Water and Sky, he and his now-wife Marypat Zitser were unmarried but a secure couple of many years. Both had significant wilderness tripping experience, but like most of us, their trips had all been somewhat limited in duration. This one would be different. Without analyzing their motives too closely, they decided upon a really extended trip that would take them some 2,000 miles through Canada, much of it wilderness, and would last over 400 days.

Launching at Jasper, Alberta, on the Athabasca River, Kesselheim and Zitser paddled a couple of months to Lake Athabasca, where they wintered over, serving as caretakers of a fishing camp empty for the season. After a 7-month winter spent almost entirely alone, they were met at ice-out by Kesselheim's brother and sister-in-law and, now with two canoes, traveled north out of Lake Athabasca, up the Dubawni River into the Northwest Territory, then through a series of portages to the Kazan River and downstream to Baker Lake, an arm on the western side of Hudson Bay.

Kesselheim strikes just the right balance (to my taste) of straight description of events with meaningful reflection. His use of detail is enough to give a surprisingly vivid sense of what life is like under the circumstances he describes, without overloading the reader with a day-by-day, mile-by-mile account of what happened on the river. He doesn't go into detail on gear or provisioning -- this isn't a how-to book by any means -- but neither does he get all philosophical or, god forbid (snicker), spiritual, on the reader. Even entirely nonspiritual wilderness travelers, though, have their deep reasons for going, and the author examines his forthrightly. If a thinking person spends 7 months holed up in a cabin with just one other person, there had better be some interesting thoughts going on if they are to retain their sanity.

The last part of their journey, above the treeline in the Northwest Territory, is particularly eloquently told. There are musk oxen, migrating herds of tens of thousands of caribou, evidence of occupation by the inland Inuit of years past, and now and then a good rousing drop over a ledge in the river. The tundra Kesselheim describes is tremendously appealing to read about -- appealing enough to make one want to, if not follow in his footsteps, then seek an equally remote and unexplored river and do something similar -- but Kesselheim also makes the hardships sufficiently clear so that few readers will actually follow that romantic impulse.

Book Review: Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes

Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes
By Gary Dierking
International Marine, 2007
ISBN 9780071487917
$22.95
Review by Bob Holtzman

Gary Dierking is an American who has lived in New Zealand for many years. A skilled boat designer and builder, he has been fascinated by multihulls since his youth, and he has devoted much of his professional energies to catamarans, proas, outrigger canoes, and their ilk. While much of his work is, full custom, he also series-manufactures at least one outrigger canoe of his own design in composites (i.e., fiberglass).

In Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes, Dierking presents three of this own designs in full detail for amateur construction. These boats are:

• Ulua: A 17'9" Hawaiian-inspired design with a tacking rig for strip-plank construction


• T2: Also 17'9" and strip-planked, based on Micronesian canoes, with a variety of shunting sailing rigs


• Wa'apa: inspired by Hawaiian "three-board" canoes, and designed for stitch-and-glue plywood construction, she can be built as a 16-footer, a 24-footer, and/or in modular sections that allow the owner to switch back and forth between these two lengths with the inclusion or exclusion of a central 8' section between two 8' fore and aft sections.

These are beautiful boats, even the square-sided Wa'apa, but if your dream of the south Pacific includes floating idylls in calm lagoons with fruity alcohol drinks in a coconut shell, these boats won't do it for you. Looking at their lines, one can only conclude they are screamers: exciting craft that should keep any sailor on his toes and run rings around most sailboats twice their length.

Dierking includes complete building plans for all three boats in the book and, with its 8.5" x 11" format, reproduction is large enough (just) to build any of the designs right out of the book. (If your eyesight can't handle the size, or you want the greater precision that larger plans might allow, they are also available in larger formats from the author: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/garyd/) The step-by-step explanation of the building procedures is concise and clear: so much so that one wonders why authors of other books on strip planking and stitch and glue construction need twice as much space to cover the same ground. Perhaps it's partly a function of Dierking's 3D how-to illustrations, generated in a drawing program and extraordinarily concise and clear in their own right: they reveal how the things go together more clearly than any number of 2D drawings and verbiage. This is one multi-skilled individual: he can design a boat; do the research on the cultural background; draw; write; and his workmanship as a boatbuilder is of a very high order.

The only thing that keeps me from being too envious is that I was his editor at International Marine (yes, this is the disclosure), and in that role, I do believe I considerably improved the book's organization. Indeed, I'm immensely proud of having helped bring this book into publication, for I feel it's one of the best boatbuilding books published within the past five years or so (I've read a few!). But the credit is the author's.

Of real importance is Dierking's presentation of numerous sailing rigs: several versions each of tacking rigs and shunting rigs, including an original, windsurfer-like shunting rig of Dierking's own design. (He calls it the Gibbons/Dierking rig, named for naturalist Euell Gibbons, but I feel he's being too modest. The rather crude rig that Gibbons designed provided only a bit of general direction to Dierking, and it suffered from tremendous weather helm. Dierking's version is really unique, perfectly balanced, and very sophisticated.) He gives the pros and cons of each rig type and provides useful guidance in how to sail a shunting rig -- something with which few Western sailors are familiar.

The boats are not simple -- they have a lot more bits and pieces than your average design for amateur construction of comparable displacement -- but none of the procedures are difficult. To build any of them, you will need a certain amount of dedication. They're also rather limited in their applications. For their length, they won't carry much, and they provide essentially no protection from the elements, so neither cold-weather sailing nor camp-cruising are really practical. But the benefits are numerous: they're beautiful; they're attention-getting (I think it would be impossible to take one off your roof rack and start assembling the components on the beach and not draw a crowd); and they're really, really fast.

Good book; good boats: very highly recommended.