Blog
Dec 15, 2006 Canoe Disappearance
Back in the mid 70's I did a few trips to Quetico provincial park with friends from artschool and as a result I went and bought my own canoe, an aluminum Michicraft, 16 foot long and 3 foot wide for appoximately $300.
Subsequently, as my children were growing up, we did many trips to the Wisconsin River and camped on Pine Island using the canoe to get us there.
When I moved to California, I left the canoe behind with my son. He moved to LA a few years later and left the canoe with my daughter. She kept the canoe in the back yard of the place she was renting. A few weeks ago, the canoe disappeared, apparently stolen. She called the police and was told that people steal aluminum canoes and sell them for scrap value. She called all the scrap yards in town without anyone fessing up to having received a canoe. Well perhaps someone will actually paddle that canoe. Perhaps not. My daughter was concerned that I would be upset at the loss of this family heirloom. I wasn't. I felt that perhaps I should be. But I don't think I was. This canoe allowed us to have many good times, but quite frankly, it was a homely creature. Perhaps I shouldn't dishonor its memory by saying so, but it was not a beauty. However, it was rugged and entirely maintenance free. 30 years of service with never a coat of paint or patching required. It probably would have been good for another 100 years had it not been stolen. So I salute this fine craft and wish it well. They're still making these boats. If you want to get something that's good for a hundred years, check here.
Dec 15, 2006 New Neighbors
Yesterday, Tim Anderson stopped by my shop. He's a new neighbor moving into the control tower building of the former naval air station.
He's with instructables.com. And his own website is here. Check it out. Lots of stuff about proas and sailing canoes, kites, etc. Nice to have a boat building neighbor.
Dec 14, 2006 John Franklin, C.P. Hall and the Northwest Passage
I thought I’d share some pictures of the Artic as it appeared in 1846. They come from a Harper’s Magazine of that year and illustrate the Arctic expedition of C. P. Hall.
Eskimo life as it now appears in the popular imagination no doubt owes much to early publications such as this one. The following two pictures of a kayak and an igloo are now firmly associated with the Eskimos.
The Esquimaux skiff, here shown against the backdrop of an iceberg traversing a choppy sea. Yes, this is the kind of stuff we like and this is why we go out in kayaks even though we don't have to any more.
The igloo, another icon of Eskimo life as it exists in the popular imagination. This is not Greenland any more but must be somewhere in north-eastern Canada. The Greenlanders wintered in permanent stone houses.
Mr. Hall had gone north to find the lost Franklin expedition which had been funded by the British Admiralty to find the imaginary Northwest Passage, a sea route across the Arctic that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific. Franklin and his men, it would later be discovered had died after their ship had been frozen into the ice. There is no agreement on why the expedition failed and everyone perished, but an autopsy conducted in the 20th century on some of the bodies revealed that they had considerable lead in their tissues. The lead was thought to have come from metal food cans whose lids were soldered on with lead. Lead is a neuro-toxin and it is thought that the men had become delusional from the lead and therefore started to wander away from the ship in search of open water.
It appears that the Hall expedition was far less grim than that of Franklin. Here the Hall expedition is anchored off the shore of Greenland en route to the Canandian Arctic and has invited the locals on board for a party.
More pictures follow with comment. But first some questions and musings inspired by the Franklin Arctic brouhaha.
First of all, why did so many expeditions to the Arctic end in failure? Reason number one as first expressed by Farley Mowat in his Arctic trilogy was arrogance. Here is Mowat on the topic of an earlier expedition in which Franklin was instructed to travel to the arctic Ocean by river from the west of Hudson Bay, then reaching the ocean to map the coastline east as far as the most eastern extremity of north America, "This was a colossal undertaking and one that bore clear witness to the sublime belief of a victorious navy that nothing was impossible to British sailors, while displaying and equally sublime ignorance of the facts of life in the arctic regions."
Observation/speculation number two. The empire mindset. It appears to me that once a country has had a successful empire it suffers for centuries after the collapse of the empire from arrogance inspired by former success. The British and the French come to mind. This arrogance manifests most clearly in the belief that their approach to doing things is the best since it formerly led them to glory and empire. I think that the Franklin expedition was organized along such lines. The kind of militaristic approach that worked so well for subduing Africans and Indians did not work against the Arctic climate.
Current climate predictions are that by the middle of he 21st century, the arctic ocean will be ice free in the summer. The northwest passage will finally exist and polar bears will most likely be extinct in their original range. They hunt from the ice and when the ice is absent, they go hungry. Even now, the arctic ice is diminishing year by year and the time that the waters near the shore are ice free is increasing. Consequently, polar bears go hungry for longer periods. There will come a time when there is no longer a need to shoot them. On the plus side, oil exploration in the arctic will become a lot cheaper.
Turning a Somersault, nowadays known as rolling. Here first brought to the attention of the western world. The first time I saw this picture was in Derek Hutchinson's book, Eskimo rolling. Now I know where he got the picture from. Note the highly up-turned ends of this kayak. There is no doubt some exaggeration by the artist, but Greenland kayaks did have higher ends in the past. The high ends went into decline when the Esquimaux got access to rifles. Tired of shooting through the high stem they lowered it. Once they lowered the bow, they had to lower the stern as well to equalize the sail area of the two ends of the boat.