Harri Luukkanen - The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of Northern Eurasia

In 1964, the Smithsonian Institution published a pioneering book describing Native American watercraft, The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America (fig. 0.1), authored by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle. By that time, the Smithsonian had been collecting Native American artifacts for more than a century, but except for a report by Otis T. Mason and Meriden S. Hill (1901) and a discussion of building a Chippewa birch-bark canoe (Ritzenthaler 1950), the Smithsonians collection of bark canoes and skin kayaks remained mostly unpublished and largely unknown (as did most indigenous North American watercraft in other institutions). Adney and Chapelle described many of these boats for the first time. Their book became popular among both scholarly and amateur boating enthusiasts; it was featured in John McPhees The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) and is now the longest-running book in print ever produced by the Smithsonian Institution.

Adney (18681950), known to friends as Tappan, was a remarkable individualan artist, naturalist, woodsman, linguist, and scholar. At age 19, while he was vacationing in Woodstock, New Brunswick, a Maliseet Indian named Peter Joe taught him how to make a bark canoe and instructed him in the Maliseet language. Adney, the son of a college professor and already a trained artist, became fascinated with Native Americans and Indian lore, in particular Indian canoes and canoe traditions. He married a woman from Woodstock, New Brunswick, moved to Montreal, and took Canadian citizenship. His interest in Native watercraft developed into a lifetime spent documenting canoes and kayaks both in the field and in museums across North America (Adney and Chapelle 1964: 4; Jennings 2004). His huge trove of collected information included tribe-by-tribe descriptions of canoe manufacturing techniques, raw materials, and vessel performance. He interviewed and photographed Native Americans making canoes; he studied, measured, and built full-size and scaled models; and he made nautical-style construction drawings of canoes lines and details.