Paddles and Bark Canoe Models at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Benson Gray

Canoe History Enthusiast
Staff member
I retired at the end of December and celebrated by visiting the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts last week to see a very popular Wabanaki paddle. In full disclosure, this is my second trip to see this paddle. My first trip was to the Peabody Essex Museum (https://www.pem.org/) but this paddle is at the Peabody Museum (https://peabody.harvard.edu/). A drawing of it appears in The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America by Edwin Tappan Adney and Howard I. Chapelle. Murat Vardar, Douglas Ingram, and others have made reproductions. I was surprised to find that the design appears to be simply painted on and not etched as described on the tag. There are also some wonderful model canoes that date to the late 1700s and early 1800s. These dates seem much earlier than I would have expected to find native crafts like this being made for the tourist trade or as toys. Does anyone know if model canoes had some ceremonial or other purpose during this era? Some pictures are attached below.

Benson



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First, that paddle is spectacular. Thank you for posting that.
WRT native models. I also have some curiosity about these. I have a bark model that was presented to my father by a ranking NNY native American. It has always puzzled me. It held some personal significance to the person that previously owned it. It is properly constructed using legitimate bark canoe build technique. It was not a toy. What was it's purpose? Mine is not very sophisticated compared to the ones that you have shared. There are no designs crafted into the bark. The lines are not as graceful.
I hope that you will share any information that you acquire about these.
BTW, congratulations on your retirement. A person with your interests will soon be wondering how you ever had time to work.;)
 
Ruth B. Phillips, Professor Emeritus at Carleton University in Ottawa has written many journal articles on this topic of early model canoes. Many of her findings have been summaries in a great book that might shed more light on your queries. It's entitled Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900

She makes mention of a few surviving model birch canoes from the 1760s onward which have found their way into European museums and private collections. Many were collected and/or commissioned by army officers at the end of their North American tours so were indeed forms of early tourist art. Other models were made as a collaboration between Catholic nuns and local Native communities as religious offerings to their Catholic orders in France. I've documented a few on my site though some of the original links in each post may have expired...

Braunschweig model canoe (c1775-1780)

1794 Mi'kmaq Canoe Model & Paddle - Musee Beaux Arts - Rennes

1799 Neuchatel Model

1762 Chartres model

1760 Farquharson model

Phillips also briefly discusses the Native American practice of model canoes & paddles specifically being made to be buried with loved ones or carried as part of a "personal bundle" for spiritual purposes. In this latter example, the example she provides is a small, hand-carved wooden canoe associated with the Potawatomi and not a more delicate bark model.

Thanks for posting these wonderful photos. When I retire, I hope to do a similar museum tour to see all these neat items in person. Hope you'll post more pics from your museum visits!
 
Thanks for posting that reference and links.
For those who have broader interests in Native American/First Nations art, cultural and history, Ruth B. Phillips has authored or edited several other books. I list them here with links to Goodreads reviews.

Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds
Edited by Phillips, Ruth B.
Review; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2137873

Native North American Art
by Berlo, Janet Catherine & Phillips, Ruth B.
Goodreads Review; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/500060

Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900
by Phillips, Ruth B.
Goodreads Review; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3268136

Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums by Ruth B. Phillips
Goodreads Review; https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12025077
 
What, Benson retired!?!!?
When did that happen?

Yes, I stopped being a full time employee on the 31st but I'm still showing up at the office occasionally. That will probably stop once things warm up enough to start spending more time outside again.

More pictures of the paddle are attached below if Chris or anyone else wants to reproduce it.

Benson


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Many thanks for posting these pics, Benson.

When I made my reproduction years ago, I had to work off the small, low-res images from the museum's site. The photo also made the wood look more orange tinted...

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There's much more carving detail on the handle (etched border & drip rings) that are visible in your shots. By the way, the other side of the paddle is also painted, but the scroll pattern is a little different

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I went to the Peabody Museum again today and tried to get some more detailed pictures. These are available at http://www.stroudwater.biz/Paddle/ now. I was surprised to see some obvious indications of wear and use. This paddle wasn't just finished and immediately put on display. Somebody spent some time on the water with this.

The bad news is that the paddle is positioned in the case so you can only really see the front and one edge. The reflections from the glass and my struggles with various automatic camera settings didn’t improve things. Hopefully, this will help anyone who wants to reproduce it. Let me know if there is anything else that I can do to help. Thanks,

Benson
 
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It's not clear to me whether the paddle is identified as a native Wabanaki build or a paddle built and painted by French Canadian traders after a native design.

The paddle has quite an aggressive dihedral, more than I prefer. The faces that slope down from the dihedral center line to the edges—are they flat or concave (scooped)?

I really like the rockered shape and designs on the Passamaquoddy canoe. If it were 11-15 feet long, it would probably function as well on a whitewater river as most modern solo or tandem designs. If it were 20+ feet, it could have been a good canoe for wave paddling on the ocean or big lakes.
 
This paddle is shown in figure 72 on page 81 of Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America with several cross section diagrams which can probably answer your "flat or concave" question better than I can. This figure is also available from https://ia800109.us.archive.org/17/items/thebarkcanoesand50828gut/50828-h/images/i097a.jpg if you don't have a copy of the book handy. The shape changes over the length of the blade and is not very flat in most places. The image also shows that Edwin Tappin Adney identified this paddle as "Passamaquoddy, 1849" so I will defer to his judgement for the attribution.

The "double curve motive" shown on this paddle is a traditional Penobscot design and denotes the union of tribes. It was widely shared with the neighboring Micmac, Malecite and Passamaquoddy. See The Double-Curve Motive in Northeastern Algonkian Art (Ottowa, 1914) at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/swje2h3u/items and Symbolism in Penobscot Art (The American Museum of Natural History, Vol. XXIX, 1927) at https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/234 by Frank Speck for more details.

Murat has kindly shared the link to the museum's documentation at https://collections.peabody.harvard.edu/objects/details/4358 and to Adney's 1/5 scale model of this paddle at https://catalogs.marinersmuseum.org/object/CL29494 in the Mariner's Museum collection.

The Passaquamoddy were known to be the most ocean oriented group of the four tribes listed previously so the rocker in their canoes is not surprising. The figure 72 listed before also includes a sail rig from 1890. The picture at https://www.mainememory.net/artifact/80722 from 1881 clearly shows a bark canoe in Bar Harbor with the bow thwart notched for a mast in the lower right corner of the image.

Benson
 
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It's also available as an online book on Archive.org where you can flip through pages and zoom in at the images. Here is the link:
https://archive.org/details/bulletinunitedst2301964unit/page/n5/mode/2up

That's interesting, Murat. Each source has different features. The Project Gutenberg source I linked has a nice table of contents that can take you directly to relevant pages but doesn't seem to be page-zoomable.

How do we know that the ("before 1899") paddle in the Peabody Museum is "the" 1849 paddle on page 81 of Adney & Chapelle, rather than just a similar one? What makes the provenance ambiguous to me is the focus on French Canadian traders on the museum ID card—"French Canadian traders popularized the practice of painting . . . paddles." This suggests to me that the natives rarely did. Yet, the card then refers to Joseph Attean (1829-70), who was a Penobscot Indian, as having blue paddles.

The French Canadian traders were around beginning in the 1600's. So, I wonder if paddle painting was common or even original to natives before then, or was it copied from the traders after the traders began popularizing the practice.
 
How do we know that the ("before 1899") paddle in the Peabody Museum is "the" 1849 paddle on page 81 of Adney & Chapelle, rather than just a similar one?

It seems highly unlikely that there would be two original antique paddles which match the design, measurements, and cross sections of the painted paddle in figure 72 on page 81 of Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. It is unfortunate that more details and the source were not provided. The model canoe shown in figure 153 on page 167 is identified as "In Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; entered in the museum catalog as of 1849." I've not been able to locate this model with the current Peabody collections database search engine at https://collections.peabody.harvard.edu/advancedsearch so can't confirm if similar documentation inconsistencies exist.

Benson
 
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How do we know that the ("before 1899") paddle in the Peabody Museum is "the" 1849 paddle on page 81 of Adney & Chapelle, rather than just a similar one?

There is some ambiguity there, but like Benson mentioned the relatively unique carving features and matching dimensional info to Adney's illustration make it likely that it is the same item. I've sent a followup request to the Peabody to see if they can clarify but years ago I was given a rather generic response that all relevant info was provided in the online listing where the 1899 date of the donation was used as the reference point. We'll see if they will respond with more details this time.

Since I sent that original query, I learned that Adney began to create many scale model paddles in the 1930s to illustrate his planned manuscript on bark canoes. These samples and accompanying notes are now in the Mariner's Museum in Virginia. Using his status as a past consultant for McGill University it appears he got in touch with various museums to document paddles. His surviving notes indicate that both the green paddle in Figure 72 and the middle paddle with the diamond-shaped blade were in the Peabody collection. This 2nd paddle apparently also had a signature of the maker with the date of 1849.

"Spatulate bladed model of cedar accompanying a large model in Peabody Museum, Harvard, ... the blade signed in handwriting of the builder; 'Soisan Dene Chulai [July] 18 1849' Scrip, French Indian alphabet invented by the old missionary LeBrousseau. Out of use before 1900, replaced by the greatly inferior English."

Given that both paddles were attributed to the Passamaquoddy tradition, It could be that Adney concluded the green paddle was from the same time period.


What makes the provenance ambiguous to me is the focus on French Canadian traders on the museum ID card—"French Canadian traders popularized the practice of painting . . . paddles." This suggests to me that the natives rarely did

I'm inclined to think that the statement about French Canadian traders popularizing the painting of paddles refers to the voyageur fleets that used decorated canoes and matching blades in the mid-1800s. This is most obvious in the surviving artwork of Frances Anne Hopkins. However, Timothy Kent, author of Birchbark Canoes of the Fur Trade (1997), makes note that these painted paddles were primarily reserved for special "express" canoes carrying privileged guests or staff. This was the case with Hopkins as her husband was secretary to HBC Govenor, Sir George Simpson. Decorated paddles were also used for occasions of pageantry like when the Prince of Wales (future King Edward VII) was touring Canada in 1860. Kent's research convincingly reveals that for the bulk of the fur trade era, paddles were NOT included in the equipment lists provided to engaged employees of the trading companies. Instead, each man had to supply his own, which resulted in a real mix of home-made designs and not the aesthetically uniform paddles seen in Hopkins' art. For these reason, it is tough to identify a standard "Voyageur" design but the general conclusion was that the majority of these working paddles were considered disposable tools so were not consistently ornamented.

In contrast, Kent noted there was a rich tradition of native decorated paddles as documented by surviving texts, manuscript illustrations and model samples that ended up in European collections. Some of the earliest examples of these are found in the Codex Canadensis written circa 1700 by a Jesuit missionary, Louis Nicholas. The images and descriptions by Nicholas mentions paddles decorate with earth pigments, incising, and basic geometric elements not unlike tribal tattoos of the era.

Kent elaborates that imported paint and pigments eventually became a highly lucrative commodity in the North American fur trade. Surviving bills of lading reveal trade in Chinese vermilion, copper-based verdigris, lead-based white, etc. Apparently despite the high cost of being sourced from remote parts all over the world, these pigments were greatly sought after by various native groups for their vibrant color and/or permanence. There is definite evidence of these trade-based paints replacing local colorants in native made art & material culture. Guess from that perspective, your could loosely state that French traders popularized painting of paddles with these novelty pigments introduced to North America
 
It seems highly unlikely that there would be two original antique paddles that match the exact design, measurements, and cross sections of the painted paddle in figure 72 on page 81 of Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America.

Adney had to have seen his sketched paddle somewhere, so there's a probability that it's the same one that was in a museum collection. The only measurement I see in the sketch is a length of 5'-11", which does match the 180.5 cm measured by the Peabody. The sketch says the wood is maple, so that should be something that could easily be determined about the Peabody paddle.

More generally, I don't see why native or French Canadian paddle makers would have done things particularly different from later and modern paddle makers. They use standard patterns and tooling techniques to reproduce popular paddle lengths, blades and grips. I also would imagine that when paddle painting or engraving became widespread that popular patterns were in demand and reproduced. Surely, too, other paddles were likely custom made and custom decorated per customer request or the artist's creative whim.
 
No doubt the coming publication of Vol 6 of the Fur Trade Encyclopedia will shed some light on media and materials.
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This final encyclopedia printed of our 6-volume set, Ornaments and Art Supplies is 549 pages long with 488 images. The 17 chapters cover beads; trade silver; jewelry; shell & bone; bells; buttons; exonumia; wire & chain; tacks; playing cards; musical instruments; fur, feathers leather and hair; paints, pigments and dyes; and paper, pens and pencils. Fully indexed with appendices on how buttons and beads were made and a glossary of French terms for trade silver.
 
A question about the symbolism behind the design on this paddle led me down another interesting research rabbit hole. The two books by Frank Speck cited in my response number 12 here are the primary sources for the double-curve design. Page five from his 1914 article says "Where clusters of the double-curve figures appear-it may be back to back, side to side, or in other relations-they denote the bonds of alliance in a general way." This paddle clearly has clusters of double-curves which would make sense as an alliance symbol. He also includes examples of the double-curve as found on various examples from native groups across North America. The Penobscot and Passamaquoddy pages are attached below. This seems to confirm Tappan Adney's attribution of this as a Passamaquoddy example based on a Penobscot design. Fun stuff,

Benson



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