North America
Dugout canoes were constructed throughout the Americas where suitable logs were available. The indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest are very skilled at crafting wood. Best known for totem poles up to 80 feet (24 m) tall, they also construct dugout canoes over 60 feet (18 m) long for everyday use and ceremonial purposes.
In 1978, Geordie Tocher and two companions sailed a 3.5-short-ton (3.2 t), 40-foot (12 m) dugout canoe (the Orenda II), made of Douglas fir, and based on Haida designs (but with sails), from Vancouver, Canada to Hawaiʻi to add credibility to stories that the Haida had travelled to Hawaiʻi in ancient times. Altogether they ventured some 4,500 miles (7,242 km) after two months at sea.
The dugout canoes were made mostly of huge cedar logs in the state of Washington for the ocean travelers but for natives that lived on the smaller rivers used smaller cedar logs.
Read more about this topic: Dugout (boat)
Famous quotes related to north america:
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“Civilization does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them. They flourish in greater abundance and attain greater strength among many barbarous people. The hospitality of the wild Arab, the courage of the North American Indian, and the faithful friendships of some of the Polynesian nations, far surpass any thing of a similar kind among the polished communities of Europe.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)