THE CANOE.
THE USE OF TOOLS—TOOL-USING INSTINCT—RUDIMENTARY STAGE OF ART—
PRIMITIVE RIVER-CRAFT—THE GUANAHANÈ CANOE—OCEAN NAVIGATION—
AFRICAN CANOE-MAKING—OREGON CEDAR CANOES—NATIVE WHALERS OF THE
PACIFIC—PREHISTORIC BOAT BUILDERS—MAWAI’S CANOES—THE
POLYNESIAN ARCHIPELAGO—THE TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA—
CANOE-FLEETS OF THE PACIFIC—PRIMITIVE NAVIGATION—PORTABLE
BOATS—THE CORACLE AND KAIAK—THE PERUVIAN BALSA—OCEAN
NAVIGATORS.
The discovery of fire, and its application even to such simple purposes
of art as the hardening of the wooden spear, or the hollowing of the
monoxylous canoe, suffice to illustrate the characteristics of man, not
merely as a reasoning, but also as a tool-using, or, as Franklin defined
him, a tool-making animal. Whilst, however, an innate instinct seems to
prompt him to supplement his helplessness by such means, mechanical
science, the industrial and the fine arts, are all progressive
developments which his intellect superinduces on that tool-using
instinct. And through all the countless ages revealed to the geologist,
with ever new orders of successive life; with beast, bird, crustacean,
insect, and zoophyte, endowed with wonderful constructive instincts, and
perpetuating memorials of architecture and sculpture, of which the
microscope is alone adequate to reveal the exquisite beauty and infinite
variety of design: yet so thoroughly is the use of tools the exclusive
attribute of man, that the discovery of a single artificially shaped
flint in the drift or cave-breccia, is deemed proof enough that man has
been there. The flint implement or weapon lies beside bones revealing
species kindred to the sagacious elephant, or to those of carnivora
allied to the dog, with its wonderful instincts bordering on reason and
the forethought of experience; yet no theorist dreams of the hypothesis
that some wiser _Elephas primigenius_, in advance of his age, devised
the flint-spear wherewith to oppose more effectually the aggressions of
the gigantic carnivora, whose remains abound in the ossiferous caverns.
But if man was created with a tool-using instinct, and with faculties
capable of developing it into all the mechanical triumphs which command
such wonder and admiration in our day, he was also created with a
necessity for such. “The heritage of nakedness, which no animal envies
us, is not more the memorial of the innocence that once was ours, than
it is the omen of the labours which it compels us to undergo. With the
intellect of angels, and the bodies of earth-worms, we have the power to
conquer, and the need to do it. Half of the industrial arts are the
result of our being born without clothes; the other half of our being
born without tools.”[66]
With the growing wants of men as they gathered into communities, novel
arts were developed; and the demands of each new-felt want called into
being means for its supply. Artificers in brass and iron multiplied, and
the sites of the first cities of the earth were adorned with temples,
palaces, sculptured marbles, and cunningly-wrought shrines. But whenever
communities were broken up and scattered, the elements of an acquired
civilisation were inevitably left behind. All but the most indispensable
arts disappear during the process of migration; and although the
wanderers might at length find a home in “a land whose stones are iron,
and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass,” no arts are so speedily
lost among migratory tribes as those of metallurgy. The hold of the
accumulated wisdom and experience of successive generations must be
partial and uncertain among an unlettered people, dependent on tradition
for all knowledge excepting such as is practically transmitted in the
operations of daily experience. Few indeed of all the wanderers from the
old centres of European civilisation to the wilds of the New World bring
with them the slightest knowledge either of the science or the practice
of metallurgy. Every chemical analyst knows what it is to receive
pyrites for silver, and ochres for iron or gold. Even now the skill of
the American miner has to be imported, and the copper-miners of Lake
Superior are chiefly derived from Cornwall, Norway, or the mining
districts of Germany.
With all our many artificial wants so promptly supplied, even in the
remotest colony, we are slow to perceive how much we owe to the wondrous
appliances of modern civilisation, and its division of labour. The
Dutchman exported his very bricks across the Atlantic, wherewith to
found his New Amsterdam on the banks of the Hudson; and the English
colonist, with enterprise enough to mine the copper and iron of Lake
Superior, still seeks a market for the ores in England, and imports from
thence both the engineers and the iron wherewith to bridge his St.
Lawrence. With such facts before us in relation even to the systematic
colonisation of a highly civilised and enterprising commercial nation,
it is easy to understand what must have been the condition of the
earth’s primeval wanderers. Their industrial arts were all to begin
anew; and thus we see that the non-metallurgic condition of primitive
social life which is designated its Stone Period, is not necessarily the
earliest human period, but only the rudimentary state to which man had
returned, and may return again, in the inevitable deterioration of a
migratory era.
Evidence of various kinds still points to a cradle-land for the human
family towards the western borders of Central Asia, and remote from its
coasts: probably in that range of country stretching between the
head-waters of the Indus and the Tigris. The earliest history of man
that we possess represents the postdiluvian wanderers journeying
eastward, and at length settling on a plain that long afterwards
remained one of the chief centres of history. But the arts there
developed belonged exclusively to a far inland people; and to this day
the rude craft of the Tigris and the Euphrates betrays a total absence
of maritime instinct or skill in navigation. The highest effort of their
boat-builders is little more than to construct a temporary raft, on
which themselves and their simple freight may float in safety down the
current of the great river. Similar rafts are still in use by the
Egyptians, formed of earthenware jars bound together by withes and
cords, and covered with bulrushes. Like the corresponding river-craft of
the Euphrates, these are steered down the Nile, never to return; for, on
their arrival at Cairo, the rafts are broken up, and the jars sold in
the bazaars. Such was the rudimentary condition of navigation in that
great Asiatic hive of nations where man chiefly dwelt for centuries
remote from the sea. But from thence the wanderers were scattered over
the face of the whole earth. The primitive river-craft, therefore, found
an early development into sea-craft; and oceanic migration gave a new
character to the wanderings of the primeval nomads. Thenceforth,
accordingly, those instinctive tendencies began to characterise certain
branches of the human family, as leaders of maritime enterprise, which
may be traced under very diverse degrees of social development: as in
the Phœnicians, the Northmen, the Malays, and the Polynesians; while
other tribes and nations, such as the Celts and the Fijians, though
living on the coast, are tempted by no longings to voyage on the ocean’s
bosom.
The islands of the Central American archipelago were the first to reward
the sagacity of Columbus, as he steered his course westward in search of
the old East. The arts of their simple natives accordingly attracted his
attention; and although he found among them personal ornaments of gold,
sufficient to awaken the avaricious longings of the Spaniards for that
fatal treasure of the New World, yet practically they were in ignorance
of metallurgic arts, and lacked that stimulus to ingenious industry
which the requisites of clothing call forth in less genial climes. The
natives of Guanahanè, or San Salvador, were friendly and gentle savages,
in the simplicity, if not in the innocence, of nakedness. Their only
weapons were lances of wood hardened in the fire, pointed with the teeth
or bone of a fish, or furnished with a blade made either of the
universal flint, or more frequently, with them, from the large tropical
shells which abound in the West Indian seas. They had learned to turn
the native cotton-plant to economical account; but their chief
mechanical ingenuity was expended on the light barks to which they gave
the now universal name of _canoe_. These were formed from the trunk of a
single tree, hollowed by fire, with the help of their primitive adzes of
flint or shell, and were of various sizes, from the tiny bark only
capable of holding its solitary owner, to the galley manned by forty or
fifty rowers, who propelled it swiftly through the water with their
paddles, and baled it with the invaluable native calabash, which
supplied every domestic utensil, and rendered them indifferent to the
potter’s art.
The canoe has a peculiar interest and value in relation to the
archæology of the New World. With our wondrous steamships, wherewith we
have bridged the Atlantic, we are apt to lose faith in the capacity of
uncivilised man for overcoming such obstacles as the dividing oceans
which had so long concealed America from the ancient world. But the bark
in which Columbus first crossed the Atlantic was in no degree more
capable of braving the ocean’s terrors than the navies of the
Mediterranean had been a thousand years before; and the primitive canoes
of the American archipelago far more nearly resembled the Pinta, or the
Niña with its lateen sails, than the smallest of our modern ocean craft.
Throughout the Polynesian archipelago, fragments of foreign vocabularies
are the chief traces of that oceanic migration by which alone the
descendants of a common race could people those distant islands of the
sea. The recognition of certain Malay and Polynesian words in the
language of the remote island of Madagascar is one striking illustration
of what such intrusive linguistic elements imply. We can thus trace the
primitive voyagers, in their _praus_, or slight Malayan vessels,
navigating an ocean of three thousand miles; and perceive how, even by
such means, the ocean highway was open to the world’s grey fathers in
remotest prehistoric times.
[Illustration: FIG. 50.—Clyde Stone Axe.]
In this view of the case, the canoe of America is the type of a
developed instinct pregnant with many suggestive thoughts for us; and
the traces of the primeval ship-builder’s art accumulate wonderfully so
soon as attention is drawn to it. On the banks of the Clyde, the voyager
from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics
of those huge steamers, which have made the ocean, that proved so
impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy
highway of commerce and pleasure for us. The roar of the iron forge, the
clang of the fore-hammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and
all the novel appliances of iron ship-building, tell of the modern era
of steam; but, meanwhile, underneath these very ship-builders’ yards lie
the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back, up
the stream of human history, far into prehistoric times. The earliest
recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of
twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt
designation of St. Enoch’s croft. It was hewn out of a single oak, and
within it, near the prow, lay a beautifully finished stone axe or celt,
represented here (Fig. 50), doubtless one of the simple implements with
which this primitive ship of the Clyde had been fashioned into shape. At
least sixteen other canoes have been since brought to light; some of
them buried many feet underneath sites occupied by the most ancient
structures of the city of Glasgow. It is difficult to apply any
satisfactory test whereby to gauge the lapse of centuries since this
primitive fleet plied in the far-inland estuary that then occupied the
area through which the Clyde has wrought its later channel; but that the
changes in geological, no less than in technological, aspects indicate a
greatly prolonged interval, cannot admit of doubt. Yet primitive man,
alike in Africa and in the New World, is still practising the rude
ingenuity of the same boat-builder’s art which the allophylian of the
Clyde pursued in that remote dawn.
The vessel in which Captain Speke explored Lake Tanganyika was a long
narrow canoe, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree. “These
vessels,” he says, “are mostly built from large timbers, growing in the
district of Ugubha, on the western side of the lake. The savages fell
them, lop off the branches and ends to the length required, and then,
after covering the upper surface with wet mud as the tree lies upon the
ground, they set fire to, and smoulder out its interior, until nothing
but a case remains, which they finish by paring out with roughly
constructed hatchets.”
[Illustration: FIG. 51.—Clalam Stone Adze.]
The islanders of the Southern Ocean, the natives of many parts of the
African continent, and the canoe-builders of the New World, all employ
the agency of fire to supplement their imperfect tools. The stone axe of
the St. Enoch’s croft canoe is formed of highly polished dark
greenstone. It measures five and a half inches in length by three and a
half in breadth; and an unpolished band round the centre indicates where
it had been bound to its haft, leaving both ends disengaged, as is
frequently the case with the stone hatchets of the American Indians and
the Polynesians. But the accompanying woodcut (Fig. 51) drawn from one
brought by Mr. Paul Kane from the Strait of De Fuca, shows a more
ingenious mode of hafting the stone adze. Such implements are in use by
the Clalam Indians for constructing out of the trunks of cedar trees,
large and highly ornamented canoes, in which they fearlessly face the
dangers of the Pacific Ocean. Some of their canoes, made out of a single
tree, measure upwards of fifty feet long, and are capable of carrying
thirty as a crew. They have thwarts from side to side, about three
inches thick, and their gunwales curve outwards so as to throw off the
waves. The bow and stern rise in a graceful sweep, sometimes to a height
of five feet, and are decorated with grotesque figures of men and
animals. The Indian crew kneel two and two along the bottom, and propel
the canoe rapidly with paddles from four to five feet long, while a
bowman and steersman sit, each with his paddle, at either end, and thus
equipped these savages venture in their light bark upon the most
tempestuous seas. One of their most coveted prizes is the whale, the
blubber of which is eaten along with dried fish, and esteemed no less
highly by them than by the Esquimaux. Since the encroachments of
European settlements on their territories their game has greatly
diminished, and few whales approach the coast; but, when an opportunity
offers, the Indians are enthusiastic in the chase, and the process by
which their prize is secured furnishes an interesting illustration of
native ingenuity and daring. When a whale is seen blowing in the offing,
they rush to their canoes and push off, furnished with a number of large
sealskin bags filled with air, each attached by a cord to a barbed
spear-head, in the socket of which is fitted a handle five or six feet
long. Upon coming up with the whale, the barbed heads are driven into
it, and the handles withdrawn; until the whale, no longer able to sink
from the buoyancy of the air-bags, is despatched and towed ashore. By
just such a process may the whale have been stranded at the base of
Dunmyat, in times when an ancient ocean washed the foot of the Ochil
hills, and the old Scottish whaler revelled in spoils such as now reward
the enterprise of the savages of the North Pacific coast.
[Illustration: FIG. 52.—Grangemouth Skull.]
It is thus seen to how large an extent the primitive canoe may have
sufficed for remote ocean expeditions. The old navigators of the Clyde
were probably not a whit less fearless than the native whalers of the
Oregon coast; and they had to face dangers fully equal to any of those
to which voyagers of the Pacific are exposed, whenever they navigated
the lochs and island channels towards its mouth, or ventured beyond it,
to face the gales and currents of the Irish Sea. The Clyde has supplied
an unusually rich store of illustrations of primitive ship-carpentry;
but the disclosures of another Scottish locality also merit notice here.
The carse of Falkirk is intimately associated with some very memorable
events of Scottish history. It is traversed by the vallum and chain of
forts reared by Lollius Urbicus the Roman proprætor of Antoninus Pius in
the early part of the second century, and is rich in memorials of many
later incidents. But underneath lie far older records. In the year 1726,
a sudden rise of the river Carron undermined a portion of its banks, and
exposed to view a canoe of unusually large dimensions, fashioned with
care from a single oak tree, and lying at a depth of fifteen feet
beneath successive strata of clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel. The
Statistical Accounts record the discovery, in the vicinity of Falkirk,
of another ancient boat buried thirty feet below the surface, in the
same carse from which the remains of a mammoth were exhumed in
excavating the Union Canal in 1821. Those traces of primitive human art
have already been referred to in the _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_,
but a further discovery in the same locality confers a fresh interest
upon them. Soon after the publication of that work, when on a visit to
Falkirk, I was shown by Dr. G. Hamilton a human skull, which at once
attracted my attention from its marked correspondence to the
brachycephalic crania of ancient British graves. It is figured here,
Fig. 52, from a careful drawing executed at a later date. The facial
bones and the whole of the base are wanting, but enough remains to show
that it is well developed, according to a type of crania of the early
Scottish tumuli. But what confers a special interest on it is, that it
was found in the same alluvial carse-land as the ancient canoes and the
fossil bones of the _Elephas primigenius_, twenty feet below the
surface, in a bed of shell and gravel, when digging the area of the
large Grangemouth lock of the Union Canal, on the 29th of June 1843.
Buried at such a depth in the detritus of the river-valley, it may be
regarded as a record of the men of the period when the valleys of the
Forth and Carron were navigable arms of the sea; and may even belong to
the epoch when their shores were peopled by a race of fishermen
contemporaneous with the whalers of Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss, and
with the monoxylous boatmen of the Clyde.
Among many of the islands of the Southern Ocean the boats are simple
wooden canoes, pointed at either end, and propelled through the water
with the paddle; but the barks of the true Polynesians are more
elaborate and ingenious. They frequently are double, with a raised
platform or quarter-deck; and are invariably provided with an outrigger,
an article seemingly of Malay origin. So essential, indeed, is the
latter deemed for safe navigation, that the most remarkable
characteristic recognised by the Tahitians, when Captain Cook’s vessels
first revealed to them the wonders of European civilisation, was the
want of the indispensable outrigger. Throughout the mythology of oceanic
Polynesia, Mawai, the upholder of the earth, and the revealer of the
secrets of the future, plays a prominent part. In one of his prophecies,
Mawai foretold that a ship such as had never been seen before, a canoe
without outriggers, should in process of time come out of the ocean. But
to the mind of a Tahitian, an ocean canoe without an outrigger was so
impossible a thing that they laughed their prophet to scorn: whereupon
Mawai launched his wooden dish on the waters, which swam without
outrigger, and the Tahitians thenceforward looked for the strange marvel
of the outriggerless canoe. Cook’s ship was regarded as the fulfilment
of Mawai’s prediction, and still English vessels are frequently called
Mawai’s canoes. The mythic prophecy seems in reality one of those vague
traditions of ancestral intercourse with other members of the human
family, such as, among the Aztecs, led to the belief that the ships of
Cortes had returned from the source of the rising sun with Quetzalcoatl,
the divine instructor of their forefathers in the arts of civilisation.
The population of the great Polynesian archipelago presents many highly
interesting and suggestive features, bearing closely on the question of
oceanic migration. The area of Polynesia proper extends from the small
islands westward of the Pelews to Easter Island, and from the Mariannes
and the Sandwich Islands to New Zealand on the south. In Tongatabu and
Easter Island, as well as in the Micronesian Rota, Tinian, Ualan, and
throughout the Caroline group, remains of massive stone buildings, the
origin or use of which is wholly unknown to the natives, reveal traces
of an extinct civilisation, and afford some possible clew to the strange
ethnological phenomena of the Oceanic archipelago. Professor Dana, who,
as geologist to the United States Exploring Expedition, had abundant
opportunities for observation, came to the conclusion that an immense
area in the Pacific has for ages been gradually subsiding; and that the
numerous Lagoon Islands mark the spots where what were once the highest
peaks of mountains have finally been submerged. Mr. Hale, the
philologist of the same expedition, gathered sufficient data from a
European who had been resident for a time on the island of Bonabe, in
the Caroline archipelago, and from his own observations, to satisfy him
that the remarkable stone structures, both Ualan and Bonabe, were
erected when the sites on which they stand were at a different level
from what they now occupy. “At present they are actually in the water;
what were once paths, are now passages for canoes, and when the walls
are broken down the water enters the enclosure.”
Such an idea seems like a glimpse of far-reaching truths relative to the
unwritten history of that recently explored Southern Ocean. When
Columbus discovered the islands of the New World he found them lying in
thickly clustered groups, and ere long he reached the mainland of a
great continent, which lay in close vicinity to its island satellites.
But it was altogether different with the Columbus of the Southern Ocean.
A strange Antarctic, as well as an Australian continent lay there also,
awaiting new discoverers; but far beyond their coasts the Pacific and
Southern groups dotted the wide expanse of ocean like the stars that
lose themselves in the abysses of night. We read with wonder, as strange
as that which rewarded the revelations of the Western Ocean in the
closing years of the fifteenth century, of the voyages and discoveries
of Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and of Cook and later explorers of the South
Pacific Ocean. When Captain Cook reached the Cape on his return from his
second expedition, in 1774, he had sailed no less than twenty thousand
leagues, through unknown seas, since he left the same point twenty
months before. His grand quest was in search of the _Terra Australis
Incognita_, a continent which it was assumed must exist in the Southern
Ocean, as a counterpoise to the land occupying so large a portion of the
northern hemisphere; but instead of this, the voyagers sailed for days
and weeks through vast seas, arriving by chance, now and again, at some
little island, cut off from all the world besides, yet tenanted by human
beings. And, as later voyagers have noted, on sailing once more into the
limitless horizon, after another long interval, in which many hundreds
of miles have been passed, another island-speck appears; and not only is
it inhabited, but affinities of speech, mythology, and the primitive
ingenuity of native arts, all concur in proving a community of origin.
The idea suggested to the sagacious naturalist is now very familiar to
the scientific mind. The Pacific Ocean is pre-eminently an area of
subsidence, where already not only implements of shell and stone, but
probably carvings, sculptures, and even architectural structures, lie
buried under the coral breccia of a modern cretacean formation, destined
it may be, to puzzle the intelligent research of a remote future, when
the northern hemisphere shall once more become the area of subsidence;
and the islands of the Pacific will constitute the summits of
mountain-chains in the _Terra Australis_ of that coming time.
We must not be misled here, any more than in our estimate of possible
Atlantic voyagers, by the undue contempt with which the European is apt
to gauge the capacity of primitive island mariners. At Vanikoro, the
native canoe is a mere rudely-fashioned trunk of a tree, sufficiently
grooved to afford foot-hold; yet to this the islander attaches an
outrigger, spreads a mat for his sail, and boldly launches forth into
the ocean, though few Europeans would be induced to venture in such a
craft on the stillest pool. Dr. Pickering, when illustrating the ideas
of ocean migration which he was led to form from intimate observations
of widely-scattered and very diverse branches of the human family,
remarks: “Of the aboriginal vessels of the Pacific, two kinds only are
adapted for long sea-voyages: those of Japan, and the large double
canoes of the Society and Tonga groups. In times anterior to the impulse
given to civilised Europe through the noble enterprise of Columbus,
Polynesians were accustomed to undertake sea-voyages nearly as long,
exposed to equal dangers, and in vessels of far inferior construction.
However incredible this may appear to many, there is sufficient evidence
of the fact. The Tonga people are known to hold intercourse with Vavao,
Samoa, the Fiji Islands, Rotuma, and the New Hebrides. But there is a
document, published before those seas were frequented by whalers and
trading-vessels, which shows a more extensive aboriginal acquaintance
with the islands of the Pacific. I allude to the map obtained by Forster
and Cook from a native of the Society Islands, and which has been shown
to contain not only the Marquesas, and the islands south and east of
Tahiti, but the Samoan, Fiji, and even more distant groups. Again, in
regard to the principles of navigation, the Polynesians appear to
possess a better knowledge of the subject than is commonly supposed, as
is shown from recent discoveries at the Hawaiian Islands. One of the
Hawaiian headlands has been found to bear the name of _The
starting-place for Tahiti_: the canoes, according to the account of the
natives, derived through the missionaries, leaving in former times at a
certain season of the year, and directing their course by a particular
star.”
But leaving such glimpses of oceanic migration, there is another aspect
in which the ingenuity of the primitive boat-builder of the New World is
exhibited, which is highly characteristic in itself; and also worthy of
notice from some of its elements of comparison with the primeval
ingenuity of the ancient world. Throughout the islands of the American
archipelago, and among the southern tribes, where large and freely
navigable rivers abound, the native canoe was made of various sizes, but
invariably of the trunk of a tree hollowed out, and reduced to the
required shape. Such appears to be the normal type of the primitive
mariner’s craft; but where obstacles interfere with its accomplishment,
the rudest races devise means to obviate the difficulty. The Californian
canoe is a mere float made of rushes, in the form of a lashed-up
hammock; while those of the Navigator Islands, in the Pacific,—so
called by La Perouse, their first discoverer, owing to the graceful
shape and superior workmanship of their canoes,—are formed of pieces of
wood sewed together by means of a raised margin. In this the skilful
carpenter is guided rather by utility or taste, than by necessity, for
the Navigator Islands are fertile and populous, and clothed to the
summits of their lofty hills with luxuriant forests and richly laden
fruit-trees.
But across the wide area of the northern continent of America, which
stretches from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Pacific, a different
combination of circumstances has given bent to the development of native
ingenuity in the art of boat-building. In the St. Lawrence itself, and
throughout all its principal tributaries, navigation is constantly
impeded by waterfalls or rapids, which constitute an insurmountable
barrier to ordinary navigation. In like manner the country along the
northern and southern shores of Lake Ontario, the valley of the Ottawa,
reaching towards the Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, and much of the
route between that and the Rocky Mountains, is a chain of lakes or
interrupted river navigation. Hence all the principal routes of travel
consist of lines of lake and river united by “portages,” or
carrying-places, over which the canoe and all its contents have to be
borne by the native boatmen, or voyageurs, as the French Canadians and
Half-breeds of the traders and Hudson’s Bay Company are called. For such
mode of transport the wooden canoe would be all but impracticable; and
accordingly, probably ages before voyageurs of European descent had
learned to handle such canoes, the native Indian devised for himself his
light and graceful bark-boat, made from the rind of the _Betula
papyracea_, or canoe-birch, which grows in great abundance, and where
the soil is good often acquires a height of seventy feet.
Portable boats were not unknown to the ancient tribes of the British
Isles. In Mr. Shirley’s _Account of the Dominion of Farney_ in Ulster, a
curious example of a portable boat is described, formed of the trunk of
an oak tree, measuring twelve feet in length by three feet in breadth,
hollowed out, and furnished with handles at both ends, evidently for
facility of transport from one loch to another. The district is one
abounding with small lakes, such as the ancient Irish chiefs frequently
selected as chosen retreats in which to construct their crannoges, or
other insulated strongholds, beyond the reach of hostile surprise. But a
closer analogy may be traced between the Indian birch-bark canoe and the
coracle of the ancient Briton described by Julius Cæsar as a frame of
wicker-work covered with skins. The same kind of canoe is in use at the
present day on the lakes in the interior of Newfoundland, where the
Montagnars from the Labrador coast frequently spend the summer. Their
birch canoes are carefully secured for the return voyage to the
mainland; and a deer-skin stretched over a wicker frame supplies all the
requisites for inland navigation. But the true counterpart to the
British coracle is the Esquimaux kaiak, which consists of a light frame
covered with skin; and as this is brought over the top, and made to wrap
round the body of its occupant, it enables the amphibious navigator,
both of the North Pacific and the Greenland seas, to brave a stormy
ocean in which no open boat could live.
Hamilco, the Carthaginian, according to Festus Avienus, witnessed the
ancient Britons “ploughing the ocean in a novel boat; for, strange to
tell, they constructed their vessels with skins joined together, and
often navigated the sea in a hide of leather.” Upwards of four centuries
later, Cæsar found the same stormy sea navigated by the southern Britons
in their coracles. When, in the sixth century, in the lives of the Irish
Saints, we once more recover some glimpse of maritime arts, it is in the
same coracles—sometimes made of a single hide, and in other cases, such
as the ocean currach of St. Columba, of several skins sewed
together,—that the evangelists of Iona crossed the Irish sea, visited
the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and even, as there is reason to
believe, preceded the Northmen in the discovery of Iceland. The old
Scottish historian Bellenden, writing in the sixteenth century, asks:
“How can there be greater ingyne than to make a boat of a bull’s hyde
bound with nothing but wands? This boat is called a currock, with which
they fish, and sometimes pass over great rivers.” This primitive boat is
even now to be met with in the river-estuaries of Wales, and on various
parts of the Irish coast: the counterpart of the Esquimaux _kaiak_, or
the _baydar_ with which the Aleutian Islanders navigate the intervening
ocean between Asia and America. Dr. Pickering remarks, on encountering
the latter to the north of the Strait of De Fuca:—“From its lightness,
elegance, and the capacity of being rendered impervious to both air and
water, I could not but admire its perfect adaptation to the purposes of
navigation; for it seemed almost to enable man to take a place among the
proper inhabitants of the deep. Such vessels are obviously fitted to
cope with the open sea, and, so far as the absence of sails permits, to
traverse a considerable expanse of ocean.”
It is a curious fact, well worthy of notice, that throughout the
American continent, seemingly so dependent on maritime colonisation for
its settlement by man, the use of sails as a means of propelling vessels
through the water appears to have been almost unknown. Prescott, when
describing the singular suspension bridges, made of the tough fibres of
the maguey, with which the Peruvians spanned the broad gullies of their
mountain streams, adds: “The wider and more tranquil waters were crossed
on _balsas_, a kind of raft still much used by the natives, to which
sails were attached, furnishing the only instance of this higher kind of
navigation among the American Indians.”[67] This statement of the
historian is too comprehensive; for, although the Peruvians were so
essentially an agricultural and unmaritime people, the use of sails in
their coasting trade constitutes one of their noticeable points of
superiority over other nations of the New World. Attention is specially
directed to this by an incident recorded in the second expedition for
the discovery of Peru preparatory to its conquest. Bartholomew Ruiz, the
pilot of the expedition, after lingering on the coast, near the Bay of
St. Matthew, stood out into the ocean, when he was suddenly surprised by
the sight of a vessel in that strange, silent sea, seemingly like a
caravel of considerable size, with its broad sail spread before the
wind. “The old navigator was not a little perplexed by this phenomenon,
as he was confident that no European bark could have been before him in
these latitudes; and no Indian nation yet discovered, not even the
civilised Mexican, was acquainted with the use of sails in navigation.”
As he drew near, it proved to be a native _balsa_, formed of huge
timbers of light, porous wood, and with a flooring of reeds raised above
them. Two masts sustained the large, square, cotton sail; and a moveable
keel and rudder enabled the boatman to steer. On board of it Ruiz found
ornaments displaying great skill, wrought in silver and gold, vases and
mirrors of burnished silver, curious fabrics, both cotton and woollen,
and a pair of balances made to weigh the precious metals. Here were the
first undoubted evidences of the existence of that strange seat of a
native American civilisation, among the lofty valleys of the Southern
Andes, which he was in search of. The balsa’s crew included both men and
women, who carried with them provisions for their voyage, and had come
from a Peruvian port some degrees to the south. Like older voyagers of
the Mediterranean, the Peruvian pilots were wont to creep timidly along
the shore; but the Spaniards encountered them in the open Pacific, where
no European prow had ever sailed. Caught by a sudden gale their bark
might have been borne far off among the islands that stud the Southern
Ocean, and here was the germ of a race of islanders, to whom, after a
few generations, the memory of their Peruvian ancestry would have
survived only as some mythic legend, like the Manco Capac of their own
Incas, or the Mawai of the Polynesian archipelago.
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[66] _What is Technology? an Inaugural Lecture._ By George Wilson, M.D.,
Regius Professor of Technology, Edinburgh University.
[67] _Conquest of Peru_, vol. i. B. I. ch. ii.