float; and so the dug-out was invented. Log, raft, and
dug-out all belong to the first and simplest type, in which there are
no artificial parts to fit together. The second type is exemplified by
the birch-bark canoe, which has three parts in its frame--gunwale,
cross-bars, and ribs--and a fourth part, the skin, to complete it. The
third type is distinguished from the second by its keel, as clearly as
vertebrate animals are distinguished from invertebrates by their
backbone. The common keeled boat, with all its variations, represents
this third and, so far, final type. All three types have played their
parts in Canada, both jointly and separately, and all three play their
parts to-day. But they are best understood if taken one by one.

First, then, the log, the raft, and the dugout canoe. Any one watching
a 'log drive' to-day can see the shantymen afloat in much the same way,
though for a very different purpose, as their remotest human ancestors
hundreds of thousands of years ago. The raft, like the log, is now a
self-carrying cargo, not a passenger craft. But there it is, much as
it {19} always was. Indeed, it is simpler now than it used to be some
years ago, before the days of tugs and railways. Then it was craft and
cargo in one. It was steered by immense oars, as sailing vessels were
before the days of rudders; other gigantic oars were occasionally used
to propel it, like an ancient galley; it carried loose-footed square
sails, like the ships of Tarshish; and its crew lived aboard in shacks
and other simple kinds of shelter, like the earliest Egyptian cabins
ages before the captivity of Israel.

The dug-out has the humblest, though the longest, history of any craft
the hand of man has ever shaped. At one time it rose to the dignity of
being the liner and the man-of-war of the Pacific coast; for the giant
trees there favoured a kind of dug-out that the savage world has never
seen elsewhere, except in certain parts of equatorial Africa. At
another time, only a century or two ago, dug-outs of twenty feet or so
were used in trade between the St Lawrence and the Hudson. They were
of white pine, red or white cedar, or of tulip tree; and their crews
poled standing or paddled kneeling, for they had no thwarts. They
carried good loads, went well, with their canoe-shaped ends, and lasted
ten or twelve {20} years if tarred or painted. They were, indeed,
one-piece canoes, which they had a perfect right to be, a