The most remarkable omission of all is of the bark canoe.  This light and beautiful fabric was peculiar to the Algonkin tribes.  It was not found among the southern Indians, much less in the West India islands.  Its buoyancy and the beauty of its form were such as to render it an object of particular observation.  Though so light as to be capable of being borne on a man’s shoulders, it would sometimes carry nine men, and ride with safety over the most stormy sea.  It was always from the first a great object of interest with the discoverers of the northerly parts of the coast, which they manifested by taking them back to Europe, as curiosities.  Aubert carried one of them to Dieppe in 1508, and Captain Martin Fringe, who was one of the first to visit the shores of Cape Cod, took one, in 1603, thence to Bristol, which he thus describes, as if he saw no other kind.

“Their boats whereof we brought one to Bristoll, were in proportion like a wherrie of the river of Thames, seventeene foot long and foure foot broad, made of the barke of a birch tree, farre exceeding in bignesse those of England:  it was sowed together with strong and tough oziers or twigs, and the seames covered over with rozen or turpentine little inferiour in sweetnesse to frankincense, as we made triall by burning a little thereof on the coales at sundry times after our comming home:  it was also open like a wherrie, and sharpe at both ends, saving that the beake was a little bending roundly upward.  And though it carried nine men standing upright, yet it weighed not at the most, above sixtie pounds in weight, a thing almost incredible in regard of the largenesse and capacitie thereof.  Their oares were flat at the end like an oven peele, made of ash or maple, very light and strong, about two yards long wherewith they row very swiftly.” [Footnote:  Purchas, iv. 1655.]

The silence of the letter in regard to this species of the canoe is the more remarkable, as it is in connection with the natives of the harbor where they spent fifteen days, that mention is made in it a second time of the manner of making their boats out of single logs, as if it were a subject of importance, and worthy of remark.  The inference is most strongly to be drawn therefore, from this circumstance, that the writer knew nothing about the bark canoe, or the people who used them.

The absence of all allusion to any of the peculiar attributes, especially of the essential character just described, of the natives of the great bay leads to the conclusion that the whole account is a fabrication.  But this end is absolutely reached by the positive statement of a radical difference in complexion between the tribes, which they found in the country.