The Andaman Islanders have single-tree canoes, and they are acquainted with the use of outriggers,[1] and I have always understood that in the management of their vessels they are expert.
On the north-eastern coasts the natives sometimes use canoes formed of a single trunk of a tree, fourteen feet in length, very narrow, and fitted with an outrigger.[2]
Undoubtedly, the larger and better vessels have been constructed on models copied from foreigners; but the natives of Gippsland and the Murray, who make canoes of bark, and tie the ends, or stop them with clay, could not have learnt from foreigners these methods of constructing such vessels. It was, perhaps, from the accidental floating of the wooden or bark tarnuk that the invention was derived.[3]
Some very interesting letters relating to the canoes of the Australians are found in the Athenæum. It is impossible, in order to do justice to the writers, to summarize the statements made in the letters; and I shall therefore quote them nearly as they appear in that journal.
Mr. O. W. Brierly says:—"The Times of Wednesday the 29th January 1862, in a review of the Transactions of the Ethnological Society, refers to the various opinions of ethnologists with respect to the original unity of the human species, and the probability or otherwise of the different portions of the globe having been peopled by the migrations of a single race, and mentions that Mr. Crawfurd holds 'the supposition of a single race peopling all countries to be monstrous, and contradictory to the fact that some of them to this day do not know how to use or construct a canoe.' At a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Mr. Crawfurd stated that the Australians have no canoes, so that perhaps these may be the people alluded to as not knowing how to construct or use them. I will not presume now to offer any theory upon the question as to the source from whence Australia was peopled, but perhaps you will kindly allow me space in your columns to say that at Rockingham Bay, on the north-eastern coast of Australia, the natives have very neatly-made canoes; and further on, at a river opening in the mainland opposite the
- ↑ "In nothing do the Andamaners show their skill more than in canoe-making. . . . . In the making and management of canoes they are simply unapproachable, even though their tools are of the rudest possible description."—Natural History of Man, by J. G. Wood, vol. II., p. 213.
Capt. Mouatt's description of the canoes of the Andamaners, quoted in the Rev. Mr. Wood's work, gives one a high idea of the skill of these islanders.
- ↑ Voyage autour du Monde. Freycinet.
- ↑ From the descriptions I have given, it may appear to the reader that it is very easy to make a bark canoe. The natives indeed make such vessels without much labor, but a European would find it difficult to imitate them. Mr. Hamilton Hume, in the account of his expedition from Lake George to Port Phillip, says, that being determined to cross the River Murrumbidgee, when flooded, he set out in search of a sheet of bark suitable for a canoe, such as the natives use; after a good deal of trouble, he got the bark, and succeeded in forming a canoe, but unfortunately, and to his great disappointment, it cracked and became useless for his purpose. He attributed this to the fact that it was late in the season, that the sap was down, and that the bark had set to the wood. His skill and enterprise were, however, exerted in a different manner; and he safely crossed the river in his cart, under which he had fastened a tarpaulin.—Overland Expedition to Port Phillip. Hamilton Hume, 1824.
