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Malecite Racing Canoe of 1888, showing V-shaped keel piece placed 

 between sheathing and bark to form deadrisc. 



]i inch thick. The sheathing was from J4 to % inch 

 thick and the rocker of the bottom, from 4 to 6 

 inches, took place within the last 4 or 5 feet of the 

 ends. The midsection showed a well-rounded bot- 

 tom, a slack bilge, and the high reverse to form 

 the tumble-home seen in the old Penobscot canoe at 

 Salem. These canoes were still being built well 

 into the 1880's, if not later, and are to be seen in some 

 old U.S. Fish Commission photographs of porpoise 

 and seal hunting at Eastport, Maine. Seal- and por- 

 poise-hunting canoes carried a sail, usually the spritsail 

 of the dory. While this model probably was little 

 changed in construction from early times, the surviving 

 examples and models are of the period when nails 

 were employed. The drawing on page 74 is of a small 

 coastal hunting canoe of the same clafs, built in 1875. 

 The reasons for the gradual decline in the building 

 of canoes of the old style are not known, and the 

 transition from the high-peaked ends to the more 

 modern low and rounded ends was not sudden. It 

 apparently began in some irland areas, particularly 

 on the St. Lawrence and the St. John Rivers, at least 

 as early as 1849, and the new trend in appearance 



finally reached the coast about 25 years later. In 

 the period of transition, the high-peaked model 

 developed toward the St. Francis type, or that of the 

 modern "Indian" canvas canoe, as well as toward 

 the low-ended type. 



One of the later developments took place on the 

 St. John River, in New Brunswick, where two Indians, 

 Jim Paul and Peter Polchies, both of St. Marys, in 

 1888 built for a Lt. Col. Herbert Dibble of Woodstock 

 the racing canoe illustrated above (fig. 66). This 

 canoe, 1 9 feet 6}^ inches long overall and only 30}i inches 

 extreme beam, was of a design perhaps not charac- 

 teristic of any particular type of Malecite canoe, but 

 it nevertheless shows two elements that may have 

 appeared during the period of change in model. 

 The sides amidships not only are without tumble- 

 home, they flare outward .slightly, but tumble-home 

 is developed at the first thwart each side of the middle 

 and continues to the headboards. The bottom shows 

 a marked V-deadrise achieved by an unusual con- 

 struction in a birch-bark canoe: the center strake of 

 the sheathing is shaped in a shallow V in cross section, 

 its width being about 2% inches amidships and taper- 



75 



