. Bulletin - United States National Museum. Science. ^M General Details of Birch-Bark Canoe Construction, in a drawing by Adney. (From Harper's Young People, supplement, July 29, 1890.) The eastern style of construction described here produced what might be called a wide-bottom canoe with some tumble-home above the turn of the bilge, but a different method of construction was used to produce canoes having a narrow bottom and flaring sides. These canoes were not set up on the building bed, in the first steps of shaping the hull, with the gunwale frame on the cover bark. Instead, a special build
. Bulletin - United States National Museum. Science. ^M General Details of Birch-Bark Canoe Construction, in a drawing by Adney. (From Harper's Young People, supplement, July 29, 1890.) The eastern style of construction described here produced what might be called a wide-bottom canoe with some tumble-home above the turn of the bilge, but a different method of construction was used to produce canoes having a narrow bottom and flaring sides. These canoes were not set up on the building bed, in the first steps of shaping the hull, with the gunwale frame on the cover bark. Instead, a special building frame, mentioned earlier, was used. Each tribe using the building frame had its own style, but the variations were confined to minor matters or to proportion of width to length. In general, the building frame is made of two squared battens, about 1}^ inch square for an 18-foot canoe. These, sometimes tapered slightly toward each end, are fitted with crosspieces with halved notches in each end to fit over the top of the battens. There may be as many as nine or as few as three of these crosspieces, with seven apparently a common number. Where ends of the long battens join they are beveled slightly on the inside face and notches are cut on the outside face to take the end lashings. Each crosspiece end is lashed around the long battens, a hole being made in each end of the crosspiece for this purpose. The lashings, commonly bark or rawhide thongs, are all temporary, as the building frame has to be dismantled to remove it from the canoe. Sometimes holes are drilled in the ends of the crosspieces, or in the long battens, and in them are stepped the posts used to fix the sheer of the gunwales. The methods of construction, using the building frame, varied somewhat among the tribes. Since the gunwale was both longer and wider across than the 54. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and
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Keywords: ., bookauthorun, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectscience
