The Kayak

摘要

Europeans often use "canoe" and "kayak" as interchangeable terms, but the kayak is another kettle of fish. It is just as native and locally endowed but born of a harsher life above the tree-line. The Ojibwe canoe's smooth form is monocoque, expressing its external folded bark basis. The kayak's angular form was dictated by its skeleton, inherited through unrecorded generations. The Inuit made their frames of wood, which is scarce in the Arctic. The frame was covered with flexible stitched skins, resulting in a seaworthy, tough craft that was portable on the shoulder of a single fisherman-hunter.Heirs to the Eskimo kayak are alive and well, and produced in many versions, sizes, and materials. One venerable and perennially useful wood-and-canvas version is the folding, roomy, clever Klepper kayak, shaped like its ancestors around flexible wooden staves and stiff wooden sections. And many designers today have adapted skin-on-frame craft by sheathing them with tough synthetic fabrics.