History Of Canoeing

[catsittingstill]

Remember 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.

Comments

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

When you say "asymmetrical", do you mean (I was assuming) front-back or (I hope not) left-right?*

* Or "fore-aft", "port-starboard"?

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

One of the surprises that serious study of design history brought me is how few new designs there actually are. As far as I can tell, everything that's easily thought of and technically feasible is usually tried within a century of the basic invention, and this is especially so when there are many craftspeople working in many places.

Isn't copy-editing of a scanned text a pain, though? There are a couple of small libraries of wooden boat books in the Northwest--I wonder if their librarians might be of some help, or have some interest in the results.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Front-back.

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. :-)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Copy-editing of scanned text is as much of a pain as copy-editing of anything else, which is to say, yes, rather a pain. I want this book for myself, and I'd like to make it available for others since it's rather a lot of work to go to for one person to read a book.

It's a very interesting book, though--the writer was writing with the assumption that the amateur boatbuilder might not be an experienced woodworker, so he explains tricks for dealing with wood that I haven't seen anywhere else.

Like sometimes when you saw a strip off a board it relieves some internal stress between parts and the shape of the board changes--becomes more or less bowed, for example. On a lapstrake boat this can cause a problem, so you draw a straight line down the middle of the board before you saw the first strip. If it stops being straight, you saw a strip off the other side (leaving room for your final shape) and then you can assume most of the stresses are relieved and measure and cut your final shape (lapstrakes are wider in the middle than at the ends, generally.) That was news to me; I don't know if it will matter for what I do, but it was interesting to know.

So there is information in there that I can see modern builders wanting. Maybe most modern builders have big paper libraries and have the book already (though the only copy I can find on Amazon is a reproduction of the 1889 version which was released in February of this year) but amateur builders like me could use it.

I dunno--I hadn't checked for it at Amazon until now. It's 18$ which probably wouldn't be enough to deter most people, and it would be nice to have it in paper so I could loan it to my boatbuilding friends when I was done reading...

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Nothing is more fun than researching the history of things that go.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

:-)

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

May I hope that I qualify as a boatbuilding friend? I sure would like to read this.

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

And things that go slowly are often more interesting than things that go fast!

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely!

If you would like the e-book, I would be happy to send you a copy of the corrected version when I get done. I'm working on the ePub formatted one, which works with Nook and a lot of other e-book readers, and ebook reader programs that run on various computers and computeroid things like iPods. (it doesn't work with my Kindle but I'm planning to convert)

If you prefer the paper version, that will have to wait until I have the paper version and until I have offered to loan it to Mr. Barnhill, which seems only fair since he loaned me _Rushton and His Times In American Canoeing_ which got me started on this whole history of canoe-building kick, so it seems fair I let him borrow it first if he is interested.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Actually I spent several years of my life paying the bills by researching the history of things that go very fast, (I wrote some books on the history of rocketry for model rocketeers) and there is no shortage of interesting stories there, either.