Colonial Boats

Anything by Howard I. Chapelle. Especially American Small Sailing Craft.  This is a fabulous resource and may be my most prized nautical book. From colonial times to end of the 19th century, it’s an in-depth look at the design, construction and use of early American types. Chapelle was a naval architect, and eventually headed the Smithsonian. It’s an academic work, with excellent drawings, yet eminently readable. 

Here’s an example plate of a Cape Cod oystering skiff. 



The book is arranged by hull type, and somewhat chronologically. It’s fascinating how the types developed for specific tasks, in specific waters. If you like boats, history, design… I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s in my top five books of all kinds of all time. Long out of print, but available used in the usual places… for <$20!! 

Earlier days.

Latter days.


The boat & my paddle were made by a close family & personal friend, Arthur Baker, aka Arthur Hazard.

This is Arthur waiting for me at the beginning of one of our Great Lakes treks. 
Keith.

I know this is not the kind of 'colonial boat' under discussion, but it is colonial, and is a boat, so.....

Journal of John Peter Salling
They left to explore the western lands.
"1741/1742 on the 16th of March 1742, we set off from my house, and went to Cedar Creek, about 5 miles where there is a natural bridge over said creek"...." we then proceeded as far as Mondongachate, now called Woods River, (Named after Abram Wood, now called the New River) which is 85 miles, where we killed 5 buffaloes, and with their hides covered the frame of the boat: which was so large as to carry all of our company, and our provisions and utensils, with which we passed down said river 252 miles as we supposed and found it very rocky, having a great many falls therin..."

I was very surprised to see evidence of a bull boat this far east and so very early. Most mention I've seen of them has been mid-19th century and on the western plains.

Some background on this story, from Frontier Culture, German chapter, an overview of Salling’s experience:

"In 1740 John Peter Salling, seven years after docking at Philadelphia aboard the Pennsylvania Merchant, took his wife Anna Maria, his daughters Catherine and Mary Elizabeth, and his son George Adam from their home on Conestoga Creek in Pennsylvania to live in the wilderness of the upper James "close under the Blue Ridge" near present Glasgow, Va. In March of 1742 John Howard, an Irishman from the lower valley, approached Salling and his neighbors Charles Sinclair and John Poteet with an offer of ten thousand acres apiece, the same amount the government offered him, if they would go on an expedition "as far as the River Mississippi." All three men, without hesitation, left families to join Howard and his son as they set out over Natural Bridge on a journey so incredible it would have to be dismissed as fiction if not documented by independent sources.

"They followed the Pennsylvania Road, fording James River at the mouth Looney's Creek, and probably paused to hunt at the Great Lick on Buffalo (now Tinker) Creek, only a few of the hunters Thomas Walker blamed for wasting game, killing "Buffaloes for diversion, and the Elks and Deer for their skins." When they reached New River near Radford they killed five buffalo, stretched the hides over a wooden frame for a boat, and descended the river until rapids bucked them off. They crossed to an eastern fork of the gentler Coal River, made another boat at the forks, and descended the Kanawha and Ohio, gliding past fifteen-foot-thick sycamores, wading through knee-deep clover, and perhaps marveling at the ribs, vertebrae, and tusks of mastodons at Big Bone Lick. As they approached New Orleans "a Company of ... French men Negroes, & Indians" captured them as spies.

"After two years in a New Orleans dungeon, Salling, Sinclair, and Poteet escaped with the aid of a fellow prisoner, a Frenchman, and sought refuge among the Choctaw people who shielded them for two months. Joined by another Frenchman and "a Negro boy," they skirted the Gulf in a pirogue and struck north from the Florida panhandle through the Creek Nation. The Frenchmen decided to remain with the Creeks; but the Americans continued to Fort Augusta on the Savannah River, then to Charleston where they boarded a vessel for Virginia. A French privateer captured the ship and set the hunters and crew adrift in a small boat in which they returned to Charleston. Now "destitute," save for "a Gun and Sword" apiece, gifts from an English privateer, Salling and his companions traveled by land to the cabin at the foot of the Blue Ridge where they had begun their journey three years earlier."

Heck of a backstory for some re-enactor.

Spence

You are exactly right on many points and I often think of incorporating a canoe into my period activities.
However, there is a factor in out lives that wasn't as big a factor in theirs, that speaks to my selected quote.

Time.

How long certain things would take wasn't as big a factor then. How long something took was How long it took. Also, in the case of making this giant bull boat, the time taken to make it was most likely more than made up for in the time it saved by traveling on the water. A dug out or other wooden boat might be a different story.

We see this, "how long it takes is how long it takes," thing play out in many things in comparing their times with ours.
How many struggle now to emulate the firearms of the time, and count the hours it takes them just to make a nice functional gun? Then add time for engraving and carving, and they become of the attitude that most guns must not have had any because it takes too long. Bit they made beautiful works in poor lighting with hand tools and self made tools often. And it was that carving and detail work that set the builder apart from the guy two towns over.
Look how so many of us agonize over the time it takes to make an outfit. We want to be out doing stuff in it, not sitting home making it. For them the time it took to make a shirt, or breaches, or whatever, was just part of life.

If we go out on a hunt or trek, most people don't want to spend their time out making repairs. To bags, moccasins, or whatever. Lord forbid one's gun get wet and time needs to be taken to pull the load and dry it. Even on a multi-day trek/hunt we generally have someplace we are supposed to be by a certain time.
We have a mental choice to make at that point. Do we agonize over "time lost" from hunting/trekking, or do we embrace the time it takes to do a period repair as part of sharing their experience?


How much less time would it take a mixed group of natives and whites to stop and make a birch bark canoe and continue their journey than it would take us? 😆

Researching pirogues I see that in modern times they were not dugouts, but just slender wooden canoes assembled from pieces. In mid- 20th century a documentary on making  the original type, a dugout, was produced. It's impressive craftsmanship.

It would have been something like this which John Peter Salling used in the late 1740s.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGM2lJHjS24

Spence

And Thank You, RyanAK, for a great thread.

A bit off-topic, but in 1976, I had the honor of helping celebrate our Country's Bicentennial by giving a concert of traditional folk music, on the barquentine Gazela, moored in Philadelphia. Quite a few sea shanties were sung, and quite a few rum punches were imbibed.

To the above listings of books, I add The Great Age Of Sail, copyright 1967, by Edita S. A. Lausanne

Richard/Grumpa