Canoes carried the first settlers of the Caribbean islands
Around 3500 BC, Amerindian groups paddled out from mainland South America and settled the first Caribbean islands in single-hulled canoes, the only way to get there. Nobody has found a sail from those voyages, which leaves archaeologists arguing over how the paddlers managed to hold course against wind and current.
The word English uses for these boats came from that very region. Columbus wrote canoa for the Caribbean dugouts in his 1493 travelogue, probably borrowing a Taino word, kanawa. Spanish passed it to French, where explorers in North America may also have mixed in terms from local languages they met there.
Carving a hull from one tree is among the oldest crafts afloat. The Dufuna canoe, dug up in Nigeria, dates to about 8500 to 8000 BC, and Danish sites show dugouts and paddles in use thousands of years later. Caribbean builders could choose from giants such as Cuban mahogany, which reaches 35 metres, and red cedar, which can grow to 60.
Design followed the job. On the north Pacific coast, peoples shaped western red cedar into different canoes for ocean travel, river trips, whaling, sealing and salmon fishing. Quinault builders in Washington State made shovel-nose canoes with a bow at each end that could ride right over a logjam instead of being carried around it. In Australia, some Aboriginal peoples cut a slab of red gum or box gum bark in summer, lit small fires inside it until it dried and curled upward, then stitched the ends together.
The ocean-going tradition has been revived on the Pacific coast since the 1980s, led early on by the Heiltsuk and Haida. The Heiltsuk paddled to Expo 86 in Vancouver, and in 1993 canoes from along the coast converged on Bella Bella for its first festival, Qatuwas. Canoeing has been an Olympic sport since 1936, although the word means different things in different places. In British usage a canoe can include a kayak, and the open version gets called a Canadian canoe instead.
Source: Canoe
