Cap. «Al>i' or^'^lSl 



Seo/e //? /ne>7rs 



Details of Micmac Canoes, Including Mast and Sail. 



three in number were of wide, thin stock and were 

 clamped in place over the ribs by three or four false 

 frames driven under the thwarts, just as were the 

 canoe ribs under the gunwales. 



The canoes could not sail close-hauled, as a rule, 

 though some Indians learned to use a leeboard in 

 the form of a short plank hung vertically over the lee 

 side and secured by a lanyard to a thwart, the board 

 being shifted in tacking. An alternate was to have a 

 passenger hold a paddle vertically on the lee side. 

 There seems to have been no fixed proportions to the 

 area of sail used; the actual areas appear to have 

 been somewhere between 50 and 100 square feet, 

 depending upon the size of the canoe. Joseph 

 Dadaham, a Micmac, stated in 1925 that he used 

 "24 yards" in the sail of a "rough-water canoe" 20 

 feet long and about 44 inches beam, while one 18 

 feet long and about 36 inches extreme beam carried 

 "16 to 18 yards"; it is obvious that the "yards" are of 

 narrow sail cloth and not square yards of finished 

 sail. In the last days of sailing bark canoes, mast 

 hoops and a halyard block were fitted so that the 

 sail could be lowered instead of having to be furled 



around the mast (to accomplish this the "crew" had 

 to stand). Dadaham also stated that for his sheet 

 belay he used a jamb-hitch which could be released 

 quickly when the canoe was found to be overpowered 

 by the wind. It appears that during the last era of 

 these bark canoes the rig had been improved to fit it 

 for open-water sailing. 



The paddles used by the Micmac appear to have 

 varied in shape. If the canoe shown in Chapter 1 (p. 12) 

 was indeed a Micmac canoe as supposed, the paddle 

 shown there is quite different from the later tribal 

 forms illustrated above, and it is possible that the 

 top grips shown in the more modern forms were never 

 used in prehistoric times, when the pole handle shown 

 with the old canoe may have been standard. 



The Micmac canoes were decorated by scraping 

 away part of the inner rind of the birch bark, leaving 

 portions of it in a formal design. It seems very 

 probable that the Micmac seldom used this form of 

 decoration in early times, but later they used it a 

 great deal in their rough-water canoes, perhaps as a 

 result of contact with the Malecite. The formal 

 designs used as decoration by the Micmac did not 



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