260 



Portable Boats. 



with good examples of portable boats in their periaguas of 

 the lighter construction ; but one of the heavier kind which 

 Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the New World, saw 

 at the Guanaja islands, was hardly portable, though made 

 from a single tree; being eight feet wide and propelled 

 by twenty-five rowers. It had awnings, etc., and was 

 supposed to have come from Yucatan. 



Among the Patagonians we find elegant examples of 

 light boat construction, most singular and interesting forms 

 being made by the inhabitants of Terra del Fuego; but it 

 is only among our own North American Indian tribes that 

 we find what, to my mind, is the most beautiful and elegant 

 of forms — the birch-bark canoe. 



The Indian canoe probably owed its origin to the peculiar 

 character of our northern regions, where myriads of small 

 lakes, each almost if not entirely joining with the other, 

 and streams and rivers, now foaming in rapids and now 

 stretching in long reaches of still water, interposed a 

 tangled net-work of impediments to the traveler without 

 boat, and at the same time remained equally difficult to 

 those whose boats could not be readily carried over the 

 numerous portages necessary. 



The origin of the birchen boat cannot be traced. Wher- 

 ever the canoe birch tree is found, the natives made from 

 it their boats. How many millions worth of fur and peltry 

 have those light canoes carried down from the heart of the 

 wilderness to the trading posts of the whites, since the day 

 when those frail boats clustered around the ship of Henry 

 Hudson ! How many white pioneers have, in these birch 

 canoes, penetrated to the far west to lay the foundations 

 of our modern empire ! 



It is superfluous to describe the Indian canoe, and it is 

 hardly necessary to remark that its frame, like all those 

 before mentioned, is permanent, and that the removal of 

 the frame of an old canoe would amount to the destruction 

 of the craft. 



