History Of Canoeing
Nov. 26th, 2010 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catsittingstillRemember when I was talking about the Bear Mountain Rob Roy and I said I thought it was not a historical design because it was asymmetric?
Well, the combination of free e-books of out-of-copyright titles, and the fact that many early European and European-descended canoeists wrote books about their experiences, means I've been reading a lot of books by early canoeists lately and I learned something new.
MacGregor describes the (first) Rob Roy at the end of _A Thousand Miles In The Rob Roy Canoe_ (1865, I think) and gives its width "about a foot abaft (behind) the beam." Which sounds an awful lot like an asymmetric canoe. And Field and Stream published a book called _Canoe and Boat Building: A Complete Manual For Amateurs_ in 1889 which has on its cover a body plan of a plainly asymmetric canoe.
It looks like asymmetric canoe design goes all the way back to the beginning of (caucasian) canoeing. (I don't know anything about Native American canoe design--I may someday but can't say a *thing* about whether kayaks or dugouts or birch bark canoes were asymmetric right now.)
I thought that was interesting. I still think the Bear Mountain Rob Roy is not a "real" Rob Roy but my belief is a lot more "hunchy" now.
Also, one of the issues with these out of copyright e-books from manybooks.net or the Internet Archive is that usually they're the result of a snatch-and-grab scan-and-OCR job. And let me tell you, OCR has some way to go yet. When the Rob Roy kept turning up as the Bob Roy and the Hob Eoy and the Bob Hoy, I thought it was funny. But in a canoe building book I'd like to know whether that "J in. keel" is 3, 5 or 7 inches, please. (Turns out it was 2 inches. Whoda thunk?)
I thought I wasn't going to be able to do anything bout it, but I asked on Mobileread and it turns out there is a program called Sigil that runs on Macs and is a wysiwyg editor for e-Pub. So I re-downloaded the book in e-Pub and am comparing the page scans to the ePub and fixing the latter as I go. When I'm done I will convert the e-Pub to mobipocket. But I've been at it for hours and I'm on page 64 of a 255 page book. This is going to take a while.
But it's really cool to read how people built canoes back in the 1880s. Did you know white pine has been used when you can't get cedar for a long time? And spruce, which most modern books describe as the standard fall back wood if you can't get cedar, was considered to be usable but markedly poorer quality than white pine? So apparently I picked the right wood when I couldn't afford cedar.
Well, the combination of free e-books of out-of-copyright titles, and the fact that many early European and European-descended canoeists wrote books about their experiences, means I've been reading a lot of books by early canoeists lately and I learned something new.
MacGregor describes the (first) Rob Roy at the end of _A Thousand Miles In The Rob Roy Canoe_ (1865, I think) and gives its width "about a foot abaft (behind) the beam." Which sounds an awful lot like an asymmetric canoe. And Field and Stream published a book called _Canoe and Boat Building: A Complete Manual For Amateurs_ in 1889 which has on its cover a body plan of a plainly asymmetric canoe.
It looks like asymmetric canoe design goes all the way back to the beginning of (caucasian) canoeing. (I don't know anything about Native American canoe design--I may someday but can't say a *thing* about whether kayaks or dugouts or birch bark canoes were asymmetric right now.)
I thought that was interesting. I still think the Bear Mountain Rob Roy is not a "real" Rob Roy but my belief is a lot more "hunchy" now.
Also, one of the issues with these out of copyright e-books from manybooks.net or the Internet Archive is that usually they're the result of a snatch-and-grab scan-and-OCR job. And let me tell you, OCR has some way to go yet. When the Rob Roy kept turning up as the Bob Roy and the Hob Eoy and the Bob Hoy, I thought it was funny. But in a canoe building book I'd like to know whether that "J in. keel" is 3, 5 or 7 inches, please. (Turns out it was 2 inches. Whoda thunk?)
I thought I wasn't going to be able to do anything bout it, but I asked on Mobileread and it turns out there is a program called Sigil that runs on Macs and is a wysiwyg editor for e-Pub. So I re-downloaded the book in e-Pub and am comparing the page scans to the ePub and fixing the latter as I go. When I'm done I will convert the e-Pub to mobipocket. But I've been at it for hours and I'm on page 64 of a 255 page book. This is going to take a while.
But it's really cool to read how people built canoes back in the 1880s. Did you know white pine has been used when you can't get cedar for a long time? And spruce, which most modern books describe as the standard fall back wood if you can't get cedar, was considered to be usable but markedly poorer quality than white pine? So apparently I picked the right wood when I couldn't afford cedar.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 03:16 am (UTC)* Or "fore-aft", "port-starboard"?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 01:02 pm (UTC)Some canoes are designed to be slightly wider in the stern than at corresponding places in the bow. If this were really exaggerated the boat would be teardrop shaped, with the sharp end leading.
left-right asymmetry is assiduously avoided. :-)