If you seek to understand the dugout canoe tradition in post-contact
America, you must understand its possible antecedents in Africa and Europe
as well.
 
Dugout canoes have been a source of folklore, mis-information, and
erroneous presumed historical origins. I think the evidence is clear that
there is no simple line of descent, from the burned-out Virginia dugout
pictured by John White in the 1580s, to the modern multiple-log dugout
canoe of today's Chesapeake.
 
Seventeenth-century Anglo-American society was a helter-skelter mix of
British, Continental European, Native American and African individuals, all
of whom brought a complete toolkit of skills and traditions. We have
inherited this potluck stew of traditions, and sometimes we have
mis-attributed traits to the wrong origins.
 
All the constituent cultures brought traditions that included dugout
canoes, low-fired hand-built ("colono") pottery and distinctive
tobacco-smoking pipe styles. If we seek the origins of these traditions in
America, we must look in Europe and Africa as well as America.
 
Bob Burgess, of the Mariners Museum, produced an excellent article on
Chesapeake Bay log dugout canoes back in the sixties for Virginia
Cavalcade, the historical magazine of the Virginia State Library. The
museum has an excellent collection of photographs of canoe-building by one
of the last practitioners. They also have documented single-log canoes that
can be attributed to individual builders or sources. One, in particular,
was built in the Dismal Swamp of a cypress log and equipped with an
outboard motor.
 
Log canoes were being built in some parts of Europe within living memory.
 
London Archaeologist magazine ran an article on English dugout canoes,
including a cover photo of an archaeologist paddling a replica of a
medieval English dugout canoe on the Thames. There is quite an extensive
literature on European dugout canoe traditions. We have no reason to
suspect that European and British settlers did not bring this technology
with them. See:
 
Damian Goodburn and Mark Redknap, "Replicas and wrecks from the Thames
area," London Archaeologist, Winter 1988, volume 6, number 1, pages 7-10,
19-22.
 
There were (and still are) dugout canoes in The Gambia that bear an eerie
resemblance to the multiple-log Chesapeake Bay dugout canoe. Maybe it's a
false-etymology coincidence, but some writers have asserted that the modern
term "bugeye" for one class of Chesapeake dugout is derived from an African
name for such boats.
 
I have discussed these issues of probable mixed origins in one article:
 
"Folk technology and creolization reconsidered," Quarterly Bulletin
Archeological Society of Virginia, March 1993, pages 1-13.
 
Here I challenged the popular but unproven concept of exclusively Native
American or African origins for colono pottery, tobacco pipes, and dugout
canoes. The bibliography is a bit cumbersome to recite here, but the
conclusion tends to swim against several popular tides.
 
For an interesting European-American canoe, see my article:
 
"Draught of a dugout pine bateau found in Byrd Millpond, Caroline Co.,
Va.," Quarterly Bulletin Archeological Society of Virginia, December 1969,
pages 120-121. Reprinted, Nautical Research Journal, volume 18, no. 2, page
110.
 
 
 
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