ily be righted if it was capsized by rough water or large prey.
With a skillful turn of his body, the paddler could quickly roll
his kayak back into an upright position without even getting
his feet wet. Th e single opening in the top trapped air inside
and would not permit water to enter.
While the kayak and umiak are the best known of Amer-
ican Indian skin boats, several other varieties of this technol-
ogy were used by western Indians as far south as California.
Th e Indian group later called the Gabrielino by European
colonists may have used their skin bullboats (a circular ves-
sel much like an umiak) since ancient times. Groups as far
inland as Wyoming and the Great Plains also used skin boats,
although these were made of the hides of buff alo and other
land mammals. Th e Crow, Omaha, Assiniboin, and Arikara
are all known to have used skin boats for inland travel on
rivers and lakes.
In wooded areas many of the ancient Americans em-
ployed wooden raft s of various kinds for the short trans-
portation of people and heavy goods, oft en within a single
territory. Th ey would have been common in river systems
throughout North and South America. Th e high and oft en
frigid Andes may not have seemed a likely place for residents
to develop a strong tradition of raft ing, much less boating, but
the Andean peoples were daring seafarers and creative build-
ers of raft s and boats.
Some 2,000 years ago early seafarers from the Nazca
civilizations employed a kind of infl atable sealskin raft in
a number of ways. Th ese infl atable raft s were used not only
as vehicles and fl otation devices for the fi shermen but also
as water transports for heavy loads. Nazca and later Moche
farmers are known to have acquired tons of guano (bird and
bat droppings they used as crop fertilizer) from caves and
rocks on the islands off the coast of Peru. Loads of this guano
were put in containers and fl oated back to the mainland on
the infl atable sealskin raft s.
Additionally, the Lake Titicaca region between Bolivia
and Peru has been inhabited for millennia by groups of na-
tives who employed the use of reed and grass raft s. Th e Ay-
mara Indians devised a raft , more like a temporary boat in its
shape, made entirely of the fi bers of totora and other kinds
of bulrush that grew in the region. Th e raft of tightly bound
reeds was used until it became waterlogged, aft er which it was
discarded. Many centuries later the Inca and various descen-
dants of the Aymara were still making and using the same
kind of raft.
Th e canoe, a boat with two pointed ends, is by far the most
common and varied of ancient American watercraft. Th e ma-
jority of canoes, from the northwest coasts of Canada to the is-
lands of the Caribbean, were made of local trees. Th ese canoes
varied in design from the plank canoes of California’s Chan-
nel Islands to the dugout canoes of ancient British Columbia,
Florida, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. All canoes, like their kayak
counterparts, were propelled by paddles rather than oars so
that the boatmen faced the direction they were headed rather
than rowing backward as in some Old World boats.Ancient Indians living in California, such as the Chu-
mash or their ancestors, developed a canoe that at fi rst glance
might have resembled a European rowboat in its carvel-
planked construction, in which long strips of wood are joined
at their edges. Upon closer inspection, however, an ancient
observer would notice that the planks were not nailed to the
underlying boat frame but rather were cleverly strapped to
that frame and to each other with vegetable fi bers or strips
of leather. To waterproof all the joinery and stitches in this
unusual craft , the ancient Californians took advantage of a
unique resource: pitch from the La Brea tar pits.
Except for those along the U.S. West Coast, almost all ca-
noes were one variety of dugout or another. Th e dugout canoe
was made by felling a tree of a suitably buoyant species, carv-
ing out its shape from the wooden matrix, then hollowing out
the hull. Th e “digging out” from which the design derives it
name was usually done with simple stone or bone axes and
awls. Th e shaping of a canoe could take weeks and perhaps
even two or three months, especially if any other work was
required, such as decorative carving or special treatments of
the wood. Th e types of wood varied with the local habitat,
and these diff erent woods might have exerted some infl uence
on the shape of the canoe.
Some canoes, such as the small cedar, poplar, and cypress
ones used by the ancient Seminoles, Caddo, and Creek, had
a shallow design for skimming across the meniscus of vine-
choked swamp or river water. Th e large, elaborately decorated
canoes of early Haida, Kwakiutl, and other Northwest Coast
Indians could hold as many as 50 people and were hewn from
a variety of large trees, including red cedar, spruce, and birch.
Th ese canoes were designed to displace water with their
heavy hulls and pointed bows and were used for both river
transport and whale hunting. Delaware Indians were known
to have used pine for their streamlined dugout canoes, which
also glided across the water in the manner of their Seminole
counterparts.
Amazonian and Caribbean Indians from the Mesoamer-
ican Maya to the Antillean Taino, like their northern neigh-
bors, fashioned large dugout canoes out of single lengths of
trees. Slightly earlier Olmec dugouts were used for inland
river travel and for journeys along the coastal waters and
swamps of the Olmec heartland in eastern Mexico. Olmec
boatmen may have caulked their damaged dugouts with the
latex from their Veracruz rubber trees. Th e Maya of the fi rst
millennium b.c.e. diversifi ed into greater coastal travel once
they settled the Yucatán. Th ey also built much larger canoes
than the earlier Olmec to supply their extended trade expedi-
tions throughout Central America.
Ancient Americans used various diff erent kinds of heat-
expansion techniques to alter the shape of their dugout ca-
noes. Amazonian groups expanded the width of their canoes
using heat expansion to twice the width of the original tree
trunk. Th ey achieved this pot-bellied shape by fi lling the
dugout portion of the canoe with water and heated rocks.
Th e heated water slowly soft ened the fi bers along the grain984 ships and shipbuilding: The Americas0895-1194_Soc&Culturev4(s-z).i984 984 10/10/07 2:30:39 PM