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984 ships and shipbuilding: The Americas ily be righted if it was capsized by rough water or large prey With a skillful turn of his body, the paddler could quickly roll his kayak back into an upright position without even getting his feet wet The single opening in the top trapped air inside and would not permit water to enter While the kayak and umiak are the best known of American Indian skin boats, several other varieties of this technology were used by western Indians as far south as California The Indian group later called the Gabrielino by European colonists may have used their skin bullboats (a circular vessel much like an umiak) since ancient times Groups as far inland as Wyoming and the Great Plains also used skin boats, although these were made of the hides of buffalo and other land mammals The Crow, Omaha, Assiniboin, and Arikara are all known to have used skin boats for inland travel on rivers and lakes In wooded areas many of the ancient Americans employed wooden rafts of various kinds for the short transportation of people and heavy goods, often within a single territory They would have been common in river systems throughout North and South America The high and often frigid Andes may not have seemed a likely place for residents to develop a strong tradition of rafting, much less boating, but the Andean peoples were daring seafarers and creative builders of rafts and boats Some 2,000 years ago early seafarers from the Nazca civilizations employed a kind of inflatable sealskin raft in a number of ways These inflatable rafts were used not only as vehicles and flotation devices for the fishermen but also as water transports for heavy loads Nazca and later Moche farmers are known to have acquired tons of guano (bird and bat droppings they used as crop fertilizer) from caves and rocks on the islands off the coast of Peru Loads of this guano were put in containers and floated back to the mainland on the inflatable sealskin rafts Additionally, the Lake Titicaca region between Bolivia and Peru has been inhabited for millennia by groups of natives who employed the use of reed and grass rafts The Aymara Indians devised a raft, more like a temporary boat in its shape, made entirely of the fibers of totora and other kinds of bulrush that grew in the region The raft of tightly bound reeds was used until it became waterlogged, after which it was discarded Many centuries later the Inca and various descendants of the Aymara were still making and using the same kind of raft The canoe, a boat with two pointed ends, is by far the most common and varied of ancient American watercraft The majority of canoes, from the northwest coasts of Canada to the islands of the Caribbean, were made of local trees These canoes varied in design from the plank canoes of California’s Channel Islands to the dugout canoes of ancient British Columbia, Florida, Nicaragua, and Venezuela All canoes, like their kayak counterparts, were propelled by paddles rather than oars so that the boatmen faced the direction they were headed rather than rowing backward as in some Old World boats Ancient Indians living in California, such as the Chumash or their ancestors, developed a canoe that at first glance might have resembled a European rowboat in its carvelplanked construction, in which long strips of wood are joined at their edges Upon closer inspection, however, an ancient observer would notice that the planks were not nailed to the underlying boat frame but rather were cleverly strapped to that frame and to each other with vegetable fibers or strips of leather To waterproof all the joinery and stitches in this unusual craft, the ancient Californians took advantage of a unique resource: pitch from the La Brea tar pits Except for those along the U.S West Coast, almost all canoes were one variety of dugout or another The dugout canoe was made by felling a tree of a suitably buoyant species, carving out its shape from the wooden matrix, then hollowing out the hull The “digging out” from which the design derives it name was usually done with simple stone or bone axes and awls The shaping of a canoe could take weeks and perhaps even two or three months, especially if any other work was required, such as decorative carving or special treatments of the wood The types of wood varied with the local habitat, and these different woods might have exerted some influence on the shape of the canoe Some canoes, such as the small cedar, poplar, and cypress ones used by the ancient Seminoles, Caddo, and Creek, had a shallow design for skimming across the meniscus of vinechoked swamp or river water The large, elaborately decorated canoes of early Haida, Kwakiutl, and other Northwest Coast Indians could hold as many as 50 people and were hewn from a variety of large trees, including red cedar, spruce, and birch These canoes were designed to displace water with their heavy hulls and pointed bows and were used for both river transport and whale hunting Delaware Indians were known to have used pine for their streamlined dugout canoes, which also glided across the water in the manner of their Seminole counterparts Amazonian and Caribbean Indians from the Mesoamerican Maya to the Antillean Taino, like their northern neighbors, fashioned large dugout canoes out of single lengths of trees Slightly earlier Olmec dugouts were used for inland river travel and for journeys along the coastal waters and swamps of the Olmec heartland in eastern Mexico Olmec boatmen may have caulked their damaged dugouts with the latex from their Veracruz rubber trees The Maya of the first millennium b.c.e diversified into greater coastal travel once they settled the Yucatán They also built much larger canoes than the earlier Olmec to supply their extended trade expeditions throughout Central America Ancient Americans used various different kinds of heatexpansion techniques to alter the shape of their dugout canoes Amazonian groups expanded the width of their canoes using heat expansion to twice the width of the original tree trunk They achieved this pot-bellied shape by fi lling the dugout portion of the canoe with water and heated rocks The heated water slowly softened the fibers along the grain
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