Making a Canoe

These lads led me to where their people were making canoes in preparation for that time when, according to the bargain, they were to leave their village of Yaocomico to find a home elsewhere.

Never before had I believed it possible for people to build such seaworthy boats with much the same as no tools!

Imagine, if you can, two men setting about to form a canoe, meaning a light boat capable of carrying three, four, or ten men, out of a huge tree trunk fifteen or twenty feet long, having nothing with which to work save hatchets of stone, and fire.

To white people, who have every kind of an implement necessary for the hewing and fashioning of wood, such a task seems impossible, and yet I have known two of these brown-skinned men to build a canoe eighteen feet long, buoyant enough to carry ten people, and of pleasing shape, within two weeks' time.

Would you know how it was done? Well, in this way: First, as a matter of course, these boat builders seek out such a tree as will best suit their purpose, and, having found it, they wrap around the trunk a quantity of dried grass and wild flags that have been thoroughly wetted. Just above these wrappings they kindle little fires by binding on dried grass, and as the tiny flame eats into the wood they chip away the charred portion with their axes of stone, working industriously, and with as little effect as does a woodpecker, until, in course of time, say, perhaps half a day, a huge tree falls to the ground.

Then, if so be a boat is to be made twenty feet long, that length is marked off, and the tree cut again in precisely the same manner as at first. Now you have a log of wood, the ends of which are rough and charred.

The bark is pulled off, and on the top, extending the whole length, are built a number of tiny fires, the workmen chip-chip-chipping with their awkward stone tools as fast as the blaze has blackened the wood, until in a week's time they have cut off the upper portion of the log to fashion the top of the canoe, and hollowed it out till it is no more than an inch in thickness.

After that, all remaining to be done is to work the two ends, by means of fire and these same awkward axes, into such form as pleases the eye, and then is finished a boat as readily handled, by those who are skilled in sailing such craft, as the fanciful vessels to be seen on the river Thames.