Tappan Adney (1868–1950)

If you have any interest in the gold rush to the Yukon in the 1890s then this is a great book to read. It was written by a newspaper man sent to document the Klondike stampede and he has a definite journalistic bent. It is full of interesting anecdotes and lots of hard facts, including lots of data on the amount of gold discovered and its value. If you want to read some history from someone who was there, this is a great choice, and since it is in the public domain, free copies are readily available at Google Books and elsewhere.… (mehr)

I admire that someone thought to publish these regional writings of Tappan Adney, but they do not really seem bookworthy. The unrelated excerpts are uneven and all over the place, and they really are not marked by any particular passion on Adney's part. He was young and his deep interest in the Maliseet and the birch bark canoe were not yet fully formed (see Bark Canoes: The Art and Obsession of Tappan Adney). And anyone seeking a Tent Dwellers type of literary experience in the reading of this book will be disappointed. There are some highlights though: his illustrations for instance, and the canoe race in Woodstock is fun. And it is interesting to get a sense of how different a place New Brunswick was then: the dependence on river travel, the prevalence of caribou in the province, and logs - it seems there were logs everywhere.… (mehr)

Howard Chapelle gathered up Adney's notes and organized them into a book on kayaks. He then appended two chapters on skin boats to make this the definitive book on portable native watercraft. I say portable because the book does not deal with dugouts which ranged from Florida all the way up to Alaska.
Since this book was published, a lot more books about kayaks have come out and so this is no longer the definitive work on kayaks that it once was, but it definitely belongs in every kayak builder's library.
And then there is of course all the material on bark canoes which comprises the bulk of this book. As far as I know, Adney's research on canoes is still the definitive word on the subject.
Kayaks and canoes documented in this book are no longer being built and specimens in museums are poorly preserved so that in the end further contributions to the topic are likely to be marginal. So we thank the people who compiled the data.… (mehr)