Chapter Seven 



ARCTIC SKIN BOATS 



Howard I. Chapelle 



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.MONO THE THREE PRIMITIVE VVATERCRAFT of 



North America (the others being the dugout and the 

 bark canoe of the American Indians), the Arctic skin 

 boats of the Eskimos are remarkable for effective 

 design and construction obtained under conditions 

 in which building materials are both scarce and 

 limited in selection. The Arctic skin boat is almost 

 entirely to be found in the North American Arctic 

 from Bering Sea to the East Coast of Greenland. 

 In Russian Siberia, only in a small area of the eastern 

 Arctic lands adjacent to the North American conti- 

 nent are any employed. 



These craft, an important and necessary factor in 

 the hunting lives of most Eskimo tribal groups, have 

 long attracted the attention of explorers and eth- 

 nologists, and many specimens have been deposited 

 in American and European museums. Like bark 

 canoes, they have unfortunately proved difficult to 

 preserve under conditions of museum exhibit. As a re- 

 sult, examples of once numerous types have become so 

 damaged that they no longer give an accurate 

 impression of their original form and appearance, 

 and some have so deteriorated that they have had to 

 be destroyed. Among the latter may have been 

 examples of types long since out of use. One such 

 type was represented by a single kayak, now destroyed; 

 as a result this form has become extinct, and only a 

 poor scale model remains to give a highly unsatis- 

 factory representation of it. 



In 1946 the late Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who was 

 then projecting his Encyclopedia Arclica, asked me to 

 prepare for it a technical article on the Arctic skin 

 boat. The decision of the sponsors to discontinue 

 the publication, after the first volume had appeared, 

 prevented appearance of the article, but in 1958, 

 through the kindness of Dr. Stefansson, it was re- 

 turned to the author for publication by the U.S. 

 National Museum. I have since revised and added 



to it, after receiving criticisms and suggestions from 

 Henry B. Collins, of the Smithsonian's Bureau of 

 American Ethnology, from John Heath, and from 

 other authorities.* 



The object of the study, as will be seen, was to 

 measure the skin boats and to make scale drawings 

 that would permit the construction of a replica 

 exact in details of appearance, form, construction, 

 and also in working behavior. Special regard was 

 given to the diversity of types with respect to hull 

 form and construction methods; but questions of 

 ethnic trends, tribal migrations, and such matters, 

 being outside the scope of the study, were not con- 

 sidered. Wherever possible, full-size craft were used 

 as the source, but where only fragments existed, 

 these had to be supplemented by reference to and 

 interpretation of models of the same type. 



In spite of the difficulty of locating skin boats of 

 some Arctic areas, examples of most of those men- 

 tioned by explorers since 1875 have been found and 

 recorded, so that, as far as possible, every distinctive 

 tribal type of Arctic skin boat which in 1946 was 

 represented by museum exhibits in the eastern 

 United States is represented in plans here. 



With the material available it was not possible, 

 of course, to explore all the individual types and forms 

 in full; hence, the geographical range of a type can 

 be stated only approximately, owing to the over- 

 lapping of VcWisA groups and the almost constant 



*For their aid to him the author takes this occasion to e.\tend 

 particular thanlis. He also thanks his Smithsonian Institution 

 colleagues in the Division of Ethnology, U..S. National Museum; 

 members of the staffs of The .\merican Museum of Natural 

 History and The Museum of the American Indian in New 

 York, of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and of the Stefansson 

 Library at Dartmouth; and the Washington State Historical 

 Society and Museum, and others in the Northwest who gave 

 both aid and encouragement. 



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