BOATS. 93 



" In those districts where large rivers, such as the Clyde, Forth, and Tay, 

 enter the sea, the lower of the two deposits, or that of twenty-five feet, expands 

 into a terrace, fringing the estuaries, and varying in breadth from a few yards to 

 several miles. Of this nature are the fiat lands which occur alone; the marein 

 of the Clyde at Grlasgow, which consist of finely laminated sand, silt, clay, and 

 gravel. Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us 

 that in the course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than seventeen 

 canoes had been dug out of this estuarine silt, and that he had personally 

 inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them 

 lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with 

 the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. In the inside of it were a 

 number of marine shells. Twelve other canoes were found about a hundred 

 yards back from the river, at the average depth of about nineteen feet from the 

 surface of the soil, or seven feet above high-water mark ; but a few of them were 

 only four or five feet deep, and consequently more than twenty feet above the 

 sea-level. One was sticking in the sand at an angle of forty-five degi'ees, another 

 had been capsized, and lay bottom uppermost : all the rest were in a horizontal 

 position, as if they had sunk in smooth water. Within the last few years (1869) 

 three other canoes have been found in the silts of the Clyde, between Bowling 

 and Dumbarton, and are preserved for inspection in the adjacent grounds of 

 Auchentorlie. Two of these had been exhumed from the bed of the river near 

 Dunglass. They were found lying abreast of each other, embedded in tenacious 

 clay, containing water-worn boulders, overlaid by a deposit of alluvial mud. 



"Almost every one of these ancient boats was formed out of a single oak- 

 stem, hollowed out by blunt tools — probably stone axes — aided by the action of 

 fire ; a few were cut beautifully smooth, evidently with metallic tools. Hence a 

 gradation could be traced from a pattern of extreme rudeness to one showing- 

 great mechanical ingenuity. Two of them were built of planks, one of the two, 

 dug up on the property of Bankton in 1853, being eighteen feet in length, and 

 very elaboratelj^ constructed. Its prow was not unlike the beak of an antique 

 galley; its stern, formed of a triangular-shaped piece of oak, fitted in exactly 

 like those of our day. The planks were fastened to the ribs, partly by singularly 

 shaped oaken pins, and partly by Avhat must have been square nails of some 

 kind of metal ; these had entirely disappeared, but some of the oaken pins 

 remained. This boat had been upset, and was lying keel upi:)ermost, with the 

 prow pointing straight up the river. In one of the canoes a beautifully polished 

 celt or axe of greenstone was found, in the bottom of another a plug of cork, 

 ' which,' as Professor Geikie remarks, ' could only have come from the latitudes 

 of Spain, Southern France, or Italy.' 



" There can be no doubt that some of these buried vessels are of far more 

 ancient date than others. Those most roughly hewn may be relics of the stone 



