Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/379

1770 extremely narrow. The sides of the tree were left in their natural state untouched by tools, but at each end they had cut away from the under part, and left part of the upper side overhanging. The inside also was not badly hollowed, and the sides tolerably thin. We had many times an opportunity of seeing what burthen it was capable of carrying. Three people, or at most four, were as many as dare venture in it; and if any others wanted to cross the river, which in that place was about half a mile broad, one of these would take the canoe back and fetch them.

This was the only piece of workmanship which I saw among the New Hollanders that seemed to require tools. How they had hollowed her out or cut the ends I cannot guess, but upon the whole the work was not ill done. Indian patience might do a good deal with shells, etc., without the use of stone axes, which, if they had them, they would probably have used to form her outside. That such a canoe takes much time and trouble to make may be concluded from our seeing so few, and still more from the moral certainty which we have that the tribe which visited us, consisting to our knowledge of twenty-one people, and possibly of several more, had only one such belonging to them. How tedious it must be for these people to be ferried over a river a mile or two wide by threes and fours at a time; how well, therefore, worth the pains for them to stock themselves better with boats if they could do it.

I am inclined to believe that, besides these canoes, the northern people make use of the bark canoe of the south. I judge from having seen one of the small paddles left by them upon a small island where they had been fishing for turtle: it lay upon a heap of turtle shells and bones, trophies of the good living they had had when there. With it lay the broken staff of a turtle peg and a rotten line, tools which had been worn out, I suppose, in the service of catching them. We had great reason to believe that at some season of the year the weather is much more moderate than we found it, otherwise the Indians could never have ventured in any canoes that we saw half so far from the