Making boats

Boats were the most important means of transport of the indigenous peoples of North America. The Aleuts and the Eskimos went sea hunting in kayaks and umiaks (canoes) whose framework was upholstered with seal or sea-lion skins. The Aleuts of the eastern part of the archipelago reached special perfection in the construction of the umiak: a wooden framework was made of short rods connected with bone bushings and fixed with tendons and straps. Some kayaks of the end of the 18th century had up to fifty joints in the framework. Due to this, even during a severe storm, the boat only bended but did not break under the rush of the sea waves.

Taiga Indians, the Athabaskan and the Algonquin, made canoes from birch bark – a light and fast means of transport that is easy to carry from one reservoir into another. The framework of such boat was made of fir roots, and bark of the “paper birch” (Betula papyrifera) which is thicker than that of ordinary birch. It took bark of eight adult trees to make one boat.

On the North-West coast, in the South-East as well as in many regions of Central and South America, dugout boats were made of trunks of large trees. The Tlingit would throw down a cedar and burn out the core, and then hollow it out and fill with water and boil it with the help of red-hot stones. After that wooden thrusts were inserted into the steamed out stem and the outer surface was grinded to attach it the form of a boat. Boards and stern were piled up with wooden planks. On the exterior surface of a boat Indians painted symbolic figures of animals – patrons of the boat owner’s clan. The Great Plain Indians used primitive leather boats, and the inhabitant of the Missouri banks – “basket-boats” on whose round framework whole buffalo skins were upholstered. Californian Indians used cane boats, but the South-Californian Indians Chumash made their boats of wooden planks. It is believed that the name of their boats as well as the techniques of their making was adopted by the Chumash Indians from the Polynesians who reached the coast of North America about a thousand years ago. North American Indians did not use sails, but the Eskimos sometimes equipped their umiaks with sails. Neither did the inhabitants of the New World know oarlocks.

Model of boat. USA, Russian America. The Tlingit. The first third of the 19th cent.
Map of different kinds of boats distribution in North America		Kayak rowing. Soloviova T.		Structure of  birch bark boat of the Alhonquins. The Algonquins.
A model of boat. Canada. The Algonquins.		A model of boat. USA. Russian America. The Tlingits.