The Indian Canoe
We in North America tend to view the canoe as “our” invention, an invention of the North American Indian. This is not so. The canoe was “invented” by many peoples in many parts of the world - Africa, Asia, South America, and the islands of the South Pacific, the only differences being in the method of construction. The river tribes of Africa, the aboriginals of Asia, the Polynesians, the Paupaus, the Indians of South America, and even those of the North American Pacific coast, used dugout canoes. Eastern American Indians and those in the western mountains, on the other hand, made their canoes out of bark. We tend to think of birch-bark canoes as typical, yet bark from at least 10 or 12 other species of trees was also used. The Iroquois, for example, commonly made canoes of elm bark, while the Kootneys and other mountain tribes of British Columbia used pine. However, the birch-bark canoe was the most widely used because the white birch or paper birch grows widely across the northern portion of this continent, and because it is easily peeled, fairly pliable when wet, and surprisingly durable.
All bark canoes had one feature in common. They were light and easy to handle, both in and out of the water. They were as ideal for traveling “up the little rivers as up the large ones” as Samuel de Champlain once put it. Indeed, until the advent of cedar and canvas, and later of aluminum and fiberglass, bark was the unsurpassed material for canoe construction.
It is difficult to say which Indian nations and tribes were the best canoeists or which built the best canoes. Undoubtedly the best bark canoes were built by the eastern or northern tribes. The plains Indians, such as the Blackfeet, scorned the canoe. When the white man arrived on their land, they were already horsemen.
Father Galinue, a cartographer who traveled with the explorer La Salle, became an expert canoeist. He claimed that the Algonquins whose canoes lasted for 5 or 6 years, made better canoes than the Iroquois. Francis Parkman called the Huron canoes “masterpieces of Indian handiwork.” Diamond Jenness, in his book Indians of Canada (Queen’s Printer, 1960), lists the Micmacs, the Algonquins, the Hurons (particularly the Ottawas), and the Swampy Crees as being the best canoeists. But Sir George Simpson, the governor of the Hudson Bay Company after it had amalgamated with the North West Company in 1821, used Iroquois canoeists on all his travels in the Canadian north and west, having great faith in their ability with a paddle and on a portage.
The Slave and Dogrib Indians of the far north built birch-bark canoes with spruce frames. These were rather small, usually made for only one man. Mackenzie once remarked that their canoes were agile and easy to handle.
The Interior Solish made pine canoes with sharp noses and stems running underwater, similar to the canoes made by the natives around the Amur River in eastern Siberia. These Interior Solish canoes were about 15 feet long, made of cedar frames covered with spruce or pine bark turned inside out, so that the smooth inner surface of the bark faced the water.
Of the coastal Indians, the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands were among the best whalers and mariners on the Pacific coast. They did not hesitate to venture from sight of land on their whaling expeditions. Probably all the coastal tribes in their dugout canoes were expert canoeists, although not all used large war canoes. In fact, most were small craft for two to four men, used mainly for fishing and sealing.
The first white man to see canoes was, of course, Columbus, who saw those of the Carib Indians. The name canoe reportedly comes from the Carib word “kanawa.” But linguistically the word can be traced even further, to the old Siberian and Mongolian languages where similar terms mean “a boat with pointed ends.”
Probably the first white man to see an Indian birch-bark canoe was John Cabot in 1497 when he dropped anchor off the coast of Cape Breton Island where the Micmac Indians were expert canoeists. But nothing exists of Cabot’s thoughts about this Indian vessel. It took another century, when the great era of exploration started, for the canoe’s virtues to be appreciated by the white man.